Knitting odds and ends

Shortly after I started the crochet circular coat for my sister my best friend asked me if I would make something for her.  I had knitted her a pair of socks for Christmas and she wanted a pair as a present for her Mum who always has cold feet.  Now I love her Mum she's always been great to me - so I was more than happy to knit her a pair of socks.

The only problem was that I didn't have a pattern for socks her size.  The only socks I'd made were either too big or too small.  So I went on Ravelly to find a pair of socks in her size. What I found was that there is no such thing.  All the patterns would say vague things like knit till the length you want.  Well I didn't know what length I wanted so all I could do was look up some basic foot charts and using her shoe size knit to a standard length.  I assume that socks are stretchy enough that a little variation in size can be ignored.

The sock pattern that I decided on was the Fidelio Pattern.  My friend had asked for the socks to be pink but I struggled a bit to find pink sock yarn.  In the end I found a flamingo pink 100% superwash merino yarn at my local knitting store In the Loop.

The socks turned out great, though I'm not sure I like the top down knitting approach.  I much prefer to  knit my socks toe up.

The colour in these photos really doesn't do them justice though.

This is closer to the real colour.

Once I was finished with these socks I started on a pair for myself.  I had two skeins of The Kiwi Pop Studio fingering weight yarn in Lemon and Chartreuse (Aussie green and gold my friend - green and gold).  I went looking for a pattern I could use that would use two colours and came up with the Chain Reaction sock.  I knitted up a gauge swatch and found that my swatch was quite a bit bigger than specified, and since I was already using size 1 needles and didn't have anything smaller I had to do a few adjustments to the pattern to get my socks to fit me.

I do love these socks,  the pattern and the stripe underneath the foot, but they don't have great stretch or recovery, which is a bit of a shame and unfortunately after they were washed once, the green colour faded a lot so in these pictures the pattern is barely visible anymore.

Next up on my knitting needles was a pair of gloves for L.  I knitted her a pair of gloves two years ago out of a beautiful alpaca that I hand dyed to a pinky red colour, and she promptly went and lost one of them so I was a bit unsure as to whether I wanted to knit her another pair, but she talked me into it - she has promised not to lose these ones.

The yarn is one that I picked up at the yarn and fiber fair held at our local farm Tangerini's.  It's from FiberStash DyeWorks and is called Twinkle Toes Sock Yarn and has a  sparkly thread woven into the wool.  For the basic glove I used the Classic Gloves #616 pattern in a child's size large.  This is just a basic glove pattern with just a little texture added to the hand in the guise of a k1p1 row every three rows.   To provide extra warmth, once the gloves were finished I went back and added a mitten flap, picking up a row of stitches half way down the hand to attach the mitten to the glove.  I used the same basic knitting pattern, and added a ribbed cuff to keep the mitten tight around the hand.

I love these gloves (and even better they fit me too) so there may be a bit of fighting going on in our house over who gets to wear these at any given time...

Black and White Corduroy Pants

During our July Meetup of the Pattern Review group at Fabric Place Basement I found a material that I fell in love with.  Its a relatively thin corduroy material with just  little bit of stretch.  It's black with a white "wallpaper" pattern printed on it.   Not sure what these patterns are actually called - it's not quite paisley, but has that same scroll like, curlicue design pattern.  Whatever it's called I love it and therefore I love this material.

I knew as soon as I saw it that it had to be  a pair of pants, but in the middle of summer I wasn't really interested in sewing long pants so the material got set aside for a couple of months.

Finally last week I decided it was time to pull the material out and make it up.  I used the pants pattern I've been working on for the last couple of years.

I think I'm pretty nearly happy with this pattern now so there's really not much to say about these.  There's two back patch pockets.

Two front slash pockets, that extend right into the fly, and a 2.5" wide waistband closed with three snaps.

 I haven't had a great deal of sewjo for the last couple of weeks, so I decided to take this project slowly.  All seams are french seamed, there are no exposed edges anywhere in these pants which is fantastic.  I even remembered to interface the fly facing for once, and turned the fly around so that it opens on the right - its just easier that way.

I finished these pants this morning and have been wearing them all day.  They have a very 70s vibe to them with the fabric pattern and the flares, but I love a good 70s flare so I'm happy with that.

As I said earlier my sewjo has not been overly high lately and I've been doing a bit of soul searching around that and I've come up with a theory.  I think it's because I've been sewing a lot with other peoples patterns.  Now I have no problems with using patterns - it's great and at times necessary, but I've decided it's not where my passion lies.  I'm a engineer.  An engineer by degree but more importantly an engineer by heart.  I want to know HOW things work - WHY is a pattern the way it is.  WHAT happens when I tweak here. It's the design (and I'm not talking fashion design here I'm talking engineering design) that makes my happy.  I like taking an image that I have in my head and working out how to make that out of a flat piece of fabric.

So no more store bought patterns for me for a while - it's back to the drafting block I go.

A Circular Crochet Coat

I just realised that I haven't blogged any of my knitting or crochet projects for a while.  I have finished a number of things over the last couple of months.

Starting with my sisters coat.

At the beginning of August my sister asked if - for her 40th Birthday present - I would make her a crocheted coat.  She had a couple of pictures of things that she liked but none of them were perfect - she wanted a bit of this and a bit of that.  That's entirely the sort of thing I love doing so of course I said yes.

The pictures she sent me of basically what she wanted was this.

She wanted something about the weight and design of the first picture, with the colour and ruffles of the second set of pictures.

These were both crochet patterns but the first one was toddler size and in Russian, the second was too light weight, without sleeves and in German.

I decided to start with the first pattern and spent a night trying to translate the pattern from Russian into English.  Luckily about a week earlier I'd done a similar translation for a friend in my knitting group when her daughter asked her to crochet her something using a Russian pattern so this second translation wasn't quite so hard.

I then made up a toddler sized version with the same type of yarn as I was planning on using just to check that this what what my sister wanted.

This got the go ahead so I went out and bought the wool.  My sister wanted something that would be easily washable but still warm and snuggly.  I've used the Caron simply soft acrylic yarns before and liked them, and they come in great colours so this is what I got.

And so I started crocheting around in circles.  I used the basic increase patterns as set up by the toddler coat and kept working until it got to the point where the mesurement across the top third of the circle was the same as my sister measurement from shoulder to shoulder.  At this point I created a hole on each side for the armholes and then kept crocheting around until it was wide enough across to wrap right around.

I then went back to the armholes and crocheted sleeves in the round, tapering them slightly as I went.

In order to finish off the coat I went back to the pattern for the second inspiration picture and found the chart for the ruffle.  After translating it from German I them modified it slightly to fit the number of stitches that I had and then worked around the coat in this pattern for another 8 rows.

I used a 3 row version of the ruffle to finish off each sleeve and the coat was done.

To close the coat I wanted to find a shawl pin.  I asked around my kitting groups and one girl mentioned that she's seen them at a knitting shop about an hours drive away so I took a trip out there and found a beautiful pin that matched the coat nicely.

Satin Brocade Bomber Jacket

The idea for this jacket came about during the construction of my last two coats.  My Bias cut A line swing coat and my purple wonka coat I wanted those coats to be extra warm, but also have a nice smooth interior to make it easy to get on and off, so I used warm and natural batting and quilted it to some purple satin. I loved the way the quilted satin looked and decided I would love to make a whole coat with this look.  I wanted a shorter coat this time however decided on a bomber jacket style.  

Thus began my search for a bomber jacket pattern.   I thought about drafting my own, but I've been struggling a bit with how much ease to include in my coats and decided that I wanted a pattern to follow for this project.  There were two patterns that I've seen around the blogoshere lately that I've loved.  Papercut Patterns  Rigel Bomber and Waffle Patterns Zipper Blouson- Cookie.  However I am more than a little close fisted and the price on these two patterns was a bit steep for me so I went looking for something a little closer to my price range and found the BurdaStyle Plaid Bomber Jacket.  This had pretty much everything I was looking for - raglan sleeves, good collar and only $6 - so I bought the pdf version and printed it out.  

This was my first time working with a Burdastyle pdf pattern.  They don't give you much in the way of instructions, but since its a pretty easy style I wasn't too worried. It was also my first time using a pattern without seam allowances.  This is not a good thing for me as I'm too lazy to actually mark the proper seam allowances so they tend to wobble a bit as I cut them by hand.

Next up I had to figure out what size to use.  The pattern came in size 36, 38, 40 and 42. According to my measurements I'm a size 40 for high bust and above 44 for waist however after measuring the pattern and comparing it to my actual measurements I decided to cut a straight size 36 - There is a lot of ease in this pattern.  

So the next thing I had to do was decide on material - This was easy.  During one of my many trips to the discount fabric store I found on the $1.99/yard table this fantastic green satin.  It has the most beautiful lustre to it - I just had to have it.  

But I figured it might be a bit much to make the entire thing from it.....so bring on the satin brocade fabrics.  I love these types of fabrics but never get a chance to use them.  I mainly make everyday type clothes and its not really an everyday material is it?  However I figured that it would make a great feature on this jacket.  I chose a cream base colour as it was the best match for the green - plus phoenixes and dragons how can you go past that!

I originally bought enough of the green material so I could line it in the same colour, however I then went and used up a good chunk of the material during the Pattern Review Sewing Bee. About halfway through the Bias challenge in round 2 I had a crisis of confidence.  I wasn't sure that my coat was "Bias" enough to meet the challenge and so I decided I would make a satin dress instead.  Unfortunately the pattern I chose did not work well when I tried to extend it to my size and after spending a day and a half trying to make it work I gave up entirely and moved on to attempt no.3.  I spent half a day on that before once again giving up and going back to my original idea.   One day I'll go back and try and finish those two dresses....one day....

Thankfully, by cutting up the skirt of the dress I still had enough of the green fabric to make my bomber jacket.  I cut the front and sleeve pieces out of the green satin and the back piece out of the brocade fabric, then cut all pieces out of the warm and natural batting material.  Then came the tedious job of quilting the two layers together.  Every other time I've quilted something it was for a lining and if there was a few puckers here or there I wasn't really worried.  This time I was trying for perfection - I didn't achieve it of course, but I did a pretty damn good job! I then sewed all the pieces together and trimmed the batting away from the seam allowances.  I have to say that that was my least favourite job of this entire make...so tedious.

Once it was together I had to think about what I wanted to do with the inside of the jacket.  I couldn't leave it as it was with the batting showing.

After a little more thought I decided that I wanted to make the entire thing reversible.  I didn't have enough of the green left so I headed back to the store - I knew that there was another piece of the green there, but then I noticed this purple material and knew i had to go with that instead. 

I only bought 1 yard as I knew that was all I needed, however once I got my fabric home I noticed that there was an entire corner missing from my yard and no matter how I laid out my pattern pieces I could not get all my pattern pieces out.  I thought about using the last little bits of the cream brocade, but there wasn't quite enough of it to do an entire piece.

However the burda pattern does include a yoke line on the back piece.  I had ignored it up until now, but now I decided that I could use that line and do the top half in the brocade and the bottom in the purple.  

Unfortunately It wasn't quite enough to make my pattern layout work so I needed another solution.  What I came up with was to combine the two sleeve pieces.  The Burda pattern comes with two pattern pieces for the sleeve with a seam up the outside of the arm curving around the shoulder.  If I joined the two pattern pieces along the straight edge of the arm, creating a dart at the shoulder I could get everything to fit.  so this is what I did.

Once again I cut all the pattern pieces out of the warm and natural batting and quilted it all together.  So now I had two separate jackets and had to figure out how to join them together.

My local discount fabric store didn't have any knit ribbing in any colour that would be useful to me so I took a trip to the more expensive fabric store.  Unfortunately they didn't have much either.  The only thing that I found was a pretty flimsy knit in either a cream colour with a tinge of green or in a purple.  I decided to go with the purple, but since the ribbing was soooo flimsy I bought a bit of knit interfacing as well hoping that I could use that to stiffen it up some.

I played around with using two layers on the knit, or using the knit and the interfacing and decided the knit by itseld, even with a double layer was not stiff enough so went with the knit plus interfacing. I cut out the collar, cuffs and hem band and sewed it onto the green layer and then sewed in the purple layer as you would bag a lining.  I got it all done...and hated it.  It looked terrible - the ribbing was all stretched out and wrinkly.

It was at this point that I remembered a piece of material that I had bought quite some time ago.  A heavy knit material in purple.  I went to my stash and dug around till I could find it....and lo and behold it was in fact a knit rib...a much heavier weight knit rib.   So I got out my unpicker and took the entire coat apart.  I re-cut the collar, cuffs and hem band in the heavier weight material, and then ripped all the interfacing off the light weight ribbing and used that ribbing as a sort of underlining just to make sure there were no issues.  

As one of the things I really struggled with first time around was attaching the cuffs to the sleeves, and since the sleeves felt really bulky I decided that whilst I had the whole thing apart I would trim down the width of the sleeve.  I tapered the under sleeve seam from nothing at the underarm to about 1.25" at the cuff.  This made the sleeve much more comfortable, but also made it a lot easier to attach the cuffs.

And so I re attached the collar, cuffs and hem band as described previously.

This just left the front of the coat to finish with the zipper.  I was lucky that the more expensive fabric store stocked reversible zippers in the length I needed, and was thrilled to find that they were a beautiful gold metal zip - that matched my jacket perfectly.

I sewed the zipper onto the green layer and then the purple layer was top stitched in place over it.

And we have a fully reversible bomber jacket in various shade of green and purple.

I love this coat.  With the two layers of quilting it is so warm.  I am a frog and I would be happy to wear my winter coat from the moment it starts cooling down, but I always feel a little silly in a full length coat in September.  This coat has all the warmth of my winter coat but in a much more autumn looking jacket.  I've worn it just about every day since I finished it.

The only thing that I would change were to I make this coat again would be the length of both the body and the sleeves.  I'm short, but at the size 36 the sleeves of this really ride up my arms if I reach forward.  I could also do with some extra length in the body as most of the time the coat doesn't cover whatever shirt I'm wearing.