Preppy Jacket

This is, I think, called the Preppy Jacket, from Debbie Stoller's The Happy Hooker. I say I think, because the book and the jacket met a nasty accident recently. Baby Bear spilt a huge glass of milk while watching the little TV I usually sit and knit in front of. The milk went right through the combined VCR/DVD which was one month out of warranty, all over the crocheted back and fronts, and the 200g ball of Bendigo wool I was using, and the book. The VCR had to be replaced (because she didn't tell me what had happened, cleaned up cosmetically, but left it to sit in a puddle of milk underneath while I, assuming an electrical problem, turned it on and off several times until I fried the circuit board - or possibly poached it). The book had to be thrown out, except for the two pages I still needed, which I tore out and threw away as soon as I had finished with them. The 200g ball had to be skeined, washed and reballed, and the crocheted bits needed washing and blocking. However it is now finished, it doesn't smell of milk after two washes (the second to block it properly yesterday), and she replaced the VCR out of her pocket money. I didn;t make her replace the book, (though I did dock her the $30) because I didn't actually like it very much.

I am pleased with the jacket. I deliberately made it slightly too small, as I am shrinking out of clothes at an alarming rate at the moment and the last two cardigan I knitted (see December posts, I think) are already quite generous on me (fortunately they are appropriate for looking generous). So I can;t quite do it up gracefully without it straining across the bust at the moment, but then I rarely do up jackets or cardigans anyway so I might not bother even when I have lost some more weight.

I have trouble getting yarn colours to come out properly. Even with fiddling around, neither of those colours are quite right. It is a tweed yarn of green, blue and red mixed together but overall looks green, unlike the photos which make it look more blue.

Vogue Knitting Grump

I like to boast that I can knit anything. Especially if it is written down in black and white AND charted. What's not to understand? Norah flippin' Gaughan's cabled capelet THING in Vogue Knitting Winter 2006/2007, that's what. I've knitted two of her other patterns before and they have turned out perfectly and I love her stuff. But for the life of me I cannot work out how to knit 34 stitches of the chart, five times, when there are 32 stitches in the chart! If I just knit an extra two from the chart each time there will be too many decreases (there are decreases at each end of the chart). Maybe I should just knit the size Large instead of X Large, that only needs 32 stitches, but I;m not sure that XLarge is going to quite fit as it is. The only thing I can think of is to add two extra knit stitches around the cable where they won't look stupid. But frankly, if I have gone to the trouble of buying a knitting publication, I don't want to have to strain an already strained brain by working this out for myself. And no there aren't any coorrections posted. There is a so-called tutorial that skips right over the actual knitting and just shows the making up, which is bleeding obvious from the written instruction.

Rant over. In foul mood because of bad night's sleep - certain little cherubs thought it would be funny to turn up the thermostat on my water bed and I spent the night poaching - and the fact that it is Wombat's Twlight Sports tonight, an occasion I loathe with a passion. It was so much easier when he was totally feral and had no social skills whatsoever and just refused to attend things like that. After all the work and therapy we have thrown at him he now desperately wants to go, but it always ends in tears (usually mine).

Edited to add - well, when I sat down, took a deep breathe and started to count stitches, it became apparent that the so-labelled 32 stitch graph actually was 34 stitches, as two of them were decreases on the first row, so all of that ranting could have been saved! I've knitted three rows of the first pentagon and it's easy as, now I;ve got that worked out!

Tomorrow, hopefully, a picture of an FO which is drying off at the moment and needs buttons sewn on.

Sirius the Ridiculous

This is what happens when your camera mad daughter shoves your camera right in the face of your dog. A very silly picture indeed!

More Andy Warhol - creepy

Baby Bear took my photo of the girl in the smocked dress and turned it into this. I think Andy Warhol would have approved - I think it is a really creepy picture compared with the original. The girl has talent, I encourage it! But I;m surprised I haven't had nightmares about this one. (The last nightmare I had was about being held hostage by Jamie Oliver - believe me, it wasn't pretty!)

Edited to add - see comment - this is exactly the same photo as the one I took in the previous post, the dark room effect was done by my daughter with photo manipulation software as were the different colours.

The 1940's - War and Austerity

More lovely costumes from the Costume Gallery in Bulleen. This was the 1940's room. For all the talk of war and austerity these clothes were, mostly, quite obviously good ones. The women's dresses are either of wool or silk crepe, the little girls' dresses of cotton, and the baby is in a smocked Viyella gown. It amused me that the blue smocked dress was almost identical to ones I made Baby Bear when she was that age - the only real difference being that I piped my collars and cuffs with the dress fabric, and these are edged with buttonhole stitch in red thread. The baby is wrapped in a mchine knitted shawl that is identical to some I have seen George's aunt knit on her machine (she was a leading light in the Machine Knitters' Guild for many, many years, though since having a stroke cannot manage the machine any more).

Edwardian Blouses

From a trip to a Costume Gallery in Bulleen, crammed full of wonderful things. I have always loved these ornate Edwardian blouses (though I am sure they were intensely hot and uncomfortable and restricting).

Baby Bears' Homage to Andy Warhol

Even if she had to be reminded who Andy Warhol is, I think this photo collage shows the payoff of taking babies to see art exhibitions. This also reminds me of that dreadful Mexican film director who did those films about coffins and things (can't sit through one of his films) and Bunel (can't do a squiggle thing when having drunk a bottle of cheap white wine with dinner). My children are actually much more beautiful and much less scary than this - well, most of the time.

Saturday Sky

Actually the sunset is Friday sky but it's too pretty to be left out. That one was taken by Baby Bear last night on the roof (which is flat and fairly safe). The others I took on Saturday between 9am and 12pm as the weather slowly moved through. Baby Bear has been taking some stunning photos recently which I may feature because she is 100% better than me and shows so much talent in this area that I am blown away by some of her stuff. Being 13 though, she is brilliant but doesn;t quire understand the accolades - despite being told she is doing collages akin to Andy Warhols', she has to be reminded that she saw Andy Warhols at the Tate Gallery and other galleries when she was in nappies, and just who she is, even is she is doing work worthy of him! One of her collages to follow. i think she is more talented than me. I don;t know whether to be proud or disillusioned. On the whole I think PROUD!!!

Treasures from the Embroiderers' Guild, Part 2

The Guild also buys representative modern embroidery. Going clockwise from top left : a piece from the 1990s by Pat Langford, Waving Grass at Jabaroo. You can't see it in the photo (BIG problems getting decent photos of textiles behind glass or in plastic sleeves!) by the tree trunks each have a line of tiny beads to make them look like bark. It is hand stitched in the main photo but there is a little ghost of machine embroidery around the edges and going into the mount (which is also fabric) of tree0like shapes; a pieve of beaded Berlin woolwork from the Victorian era, done with the most exquisite Czech glass seed beads of a type and qyality that you just can't get these days; a piece of cutwork table linen in beige done by Thelma Crawford, who was well known for using Australian designs in her embroideries (she sold kits as well, from a shop in the BLock Arcade) in the 1950s; a detail from a Victorian tea apron done with the new aniline dyed threads that were much brighter than older, natural dyed threads had been, done on fine black silk, and edged with machine made black lace.

Treasures from the Embroiderers' Guild, Part 1

Our class went on a 'field trip' (as Wombat always calls them - too much American TV!) to the Embroiderers' Guild (Vic) last week to view some of their 2,000 pieces of embroidery, lace, etc. These are pictures of an Ayrshire christening robe which was the first ever acquisition for the collection. It was exquisite. The pointed insertion on the bodice was recycled from an earlier garment, as it is a totally different style from the rest of the whiteework. It is early nineteenth century, from Ayrshire in Scotland, where unemployed hand weavers who had been superceded by machines taught themselves these new skills to earn an income. Sadly this only lasted for about fifty years until someone invented a machine that could do whitework! The gown was a pristine white - the first photo looks yellow because it is hard photographing textiles without a flash and for some reason my software fiddling either didn't work on that one, or I plain forgot.

Saturday Sky

I've manipulated this picture a little bit - I thought it looked so much like cotton wool balls that I made it look more so. We are having a heat wave (with the occasional thunder storm - I got soaked on Friday afternoon but that's the only rain we've had for ages) and I am SO SICK of being hot. 

My Marvellous Melbourne 5

 

My Marvellous Melbourne 4

 

My Marvellous Melbourne 3

 

My Marvellous Melbourne 2

 

My Marvellous Melbourne 1

 

Saturday Sky with Wisteria tendrils

 

A Simple Asymmetrical Skirt

This is dead easy and doesn't need a pattern. But you need to wear your top over the waist, or a big sash or something, for reasons that will become obvious!

I made this out of two metres of 115cm wide rayon blend that I got from Spotlight. Two metres makes a longish skirt on an average-height person and you can obviously tweak this. The width of the fabric determines the amount of wrap over.

Cut in half, align the two pieces so that the pattern or nap runs the run way, then sew together (with the the right side inside, obviously). Finish your seams in your usual way. I don't have an overlocker (serger) so I sew a normal straight seam, sew another one about 1/4 inch away inside the seam line, trim close to this and do a closish zig-zag over the cut edge. An overlocker would be MUCH faster.

Make a small hem at the top and the bottom - you aren't going to thread elastic through the top so it can be as narrow as you like.

Put on your person and use a couple of safety pins to wrap and pin the excess fabric around your waist so that it falls like this. (Hence the need to cover the waistline with clothing as it does not look too flash!

It took me about an hour of sewing, I think, but over several hours interspersed with usual domestic and school holiday stuff.

This gives you an easy asymmetrical skirt (I like asymmetry) that fits anyone and, importanly in my case, can be adjusted easily as I lose more weight.

The rayon blend drapes beautifully. The skirt will look different depending on the drape of your fabric - stiffer and thicker fabrics still look good, it will make good winter skirts too to be worn with tights - and obviously you can have it shorter if you wish. I am just about to experiment with a much shorter one to be worn with black leggings. (If I am brave enough - it is YEARS since I wore any sort of short skirt!)

I didn't invent this, or even unvent it - I was told how to do it by someone else, but I don't think it was her original idea either.

The safety pins need a bit of fiddling at first, to get the position right, but then no-one would be able to tell that you are held together with them! 

A New Wardrobe

I realised the other day that I had lost enough weight to need new clothes when my jeans fell down in front of the whole family. Fortunately I could see the funny side. I started making a pile for charity of fat clothes and went out and bought a few cheapish things in the post Christmas sales to tide me over until I have lost the same amount again!

I also sorted through all of my craft supplies and dressmaking fabric and patterns - partly to get my stuff organised before the start of the academic year (in my case, mid-February)and partly to start thinking about making new clothes. I used to make most of my clothes, for many many years, but I got bored in recent years as I put on more and more weight (that, and the emergence of some excellent plus-size shops in my local shopping mall) so haven't done anything much for ages. So this year I hope to bring a succession of new projects fresh from the sewing machine!

In the clean-up I found this nice length of pane velvet in shades of blues and greens that was straight enough and long enough to become a short winter scarf with a minimum of effort. It was originally going to go into the textile art boxes, and in fact some other scraps of it have, but with a bit of trimming and a quick zig-zag round the edges (would have been better with an overlocker but I don't have one) it's become a nice scarf. Not exactly dressmaking, but the first thing I have made for my new wardrobe on the sewing machine! 

Saturday Sky

This is actually a Friday Sky, but it's so much more interesting than the one I took this morning out the back door! George took this yesterday in the Victorian High Country near Merrijig. If you look closely you can see two plumes of smoke, on the slopes of Mount Buller. That's a real Aussie bushfire, folks, three kilometres away from where he was. 

Passion Flower

And a very happy new year to the world! We had a quiet one - some friends over for a tiny party until about 9pm, then some people went to bed, Baby Bear and her friend watched a DVD and fell into bed straight after midnight, and I followed almost immediately and read till latish.

This is a picture of a passion flower, the flower of the passion fruit vine, on top of our roof. Taken by Baby Bear a couple of days ago. (We have a flat roof, so it's safer than it sounds!) Sadly the vine is going to have to be either heavily trimmed back, or come down altogether. The flowers are spectacular though. 

And So To Wrap Up The Year

I've seen this on some other blogs and thought it was quite a neat thing to do. A wrap up of this year's blog:

JANUARY - The Diamond Patch Jumper - I started this jumper last summer. (I.e. summer 2005/2006. It progressed about halfway, then I decided to have my op and realised that it was going to miles too big for me, so I used the unused yarn to knit the Norah Gaughan Vogue Knitting cardigan which I blogged about much later).

FEBRUARY - Books! - I'm obsessed with books. We are drowning under the weight of our book collection. (This was a meme about books I had read, was going to read, wanted to read or had never heard of. As a result of this meme, Taphophile gifted me a copy of The Time Traveller's Wife, which I have only just got round to reading, and it is one of the best books I had read in a long time).

MARCH - My Beautiful International Exchange Scarf - A little late, but no less beautiful, this is my International Scarf Exchange Scarf from Tina. Tina has no blog or website and barely posted to the ISE blog, so I know almost nothing about her, but she sure knows how to pick the most beautiful colours. This is a gorgeous thick and thin yarn, fairly coarse but I just adore the way the colours meld into each other. (It was a mixture of blues and browns and very pretty indeed).

APRIL - Use What You Have Month - I haven't written so far about my Use What You Have Month. I have managed not to buy any craft materials except for a few bits I needed for my course (and for this Friday I genuinely don't need to buy anything new! I really will be using What I Have). However I haven't managed to stop buying magazines, naughty me. I did also buy one book - I really wasn't going to buy any craft books this month but this one on art quilts was exaclt what I had been looking for to help with my two major assignments due at the end of semester :)

MAY - Project Spectrum May - Green - Also K is for Kid - Fashion Show at The Highway Gallery for this year's Come For a Yarn, their festival of knitting and crochet.It is a Shardigan, pattern by Terri Ranck (Google for her, she doesn't seem to have an actual site as far as I can see), knitted in quite different yarns from those used in the original pattern.On me it is a shoulder shawl. (This was a picture of Wombat wearing a green shawl - one of my favorites and one I must knit again in other colours because it is the right size and weight to go with all sorts of things).

JUNE - School Holidays - We're halfway through the school holidays here and it has been hard getting computer time, so not much blogging has occurred. We're having a pretty quiet holiday, as we were all recovering from (everyone else) or starting (me) yet more colds and things - it has been a bad winter for viruses. There's been lots of computer games, DVDs, Gamecube games, reading, beading and hanging out with friends, so that's been nice. Last night we visited friends for dinner and had a lovely evening - their house is full of dogs and artworks and artefacts from foreign travels, and they are wonderful people.

JULY - Stitched up Festival Wangaratta - I fear that a semester of 'art school' has turned me into an artistic snob. I found myself going around the exhibits at the aerodrome muttering under my breath. There was some lovely stuff there, certainly, but nearly everything that won a first prize in its section was so conventional, while the wilder stuff rarely got even a commendation. There was a lovely series of A5 embroideries, for instance, that made me think of encrusted corsets - lots of exciting techniques and effects - and absolutely nothing for them. That artist did win a prize in another section, but with the most conventional (and least interesting) of her pieces.

AUGUST - Gum Leaves - We aren't doing as much stitch work this semester as last semester, but this is one piece I did a few weeks ago. We had to do something illustrating over-and-under techniques. I had a huge amount of fun doing this!It is not necessarily botanically or zoologically correct - I don't think this sort of eucalypt has that sort of leaf gall, and i don't know if a spider that looks like that one spins webs and hangs around in trees like this, but I confess I was aiming for effect and not accuracy! (This was a textile piece that I was very proud of!)

SEPTEMBER - Hate CPAP Machine - Rotten CPAP machine. I thought I'd had a good night's sleep last night but I feel blinkin' terrible today - headache, all over aches, knackered, just like I'd never made any attempt to get the CFS under control. (I'm glad to say that the CPAP machine and I became firm friends, I felt heaps better, and now I have lost enough weight for my sleep apnoea to have vanished entirely and I am still feeling much more energetic. The CFS and Fibromylagia haven't completely vanished but they are much more under control and life is much better).

OCTOBER - FRAGMENTS OF ME - The original collage for this work consists of childhood photos, photos of my own daughter and niece and nephews, street maps of two of the most significant places I have lived, and the (present day) board outside the hospital where I was born.Although I was reasonably happy with this collage and played around with some stitching ideas to use with it, I then decided that the composition was too static. While playing around with photo-editing software I attempted distorting the picture several times, and chose these three distortions to place side-by-side in a triptych.It shows how our perceptions of ourselves as children are distorted in the real world, and those perceptions distort further as we get older and become parents ourselves. Different aspects of our lives take precedence at different times. For me, family is a constant theme that informs how I live my life. The stitched border represents the gardens of all the places I have lived in and the domesticity that forms the bedrock of my life and relationships with others.My grandmother’s charm bracelet completes the picture. Two of the charms (the sheep which she hung the wrong way round, and the flat iron) were makeweights that she put on to balance it out. The other charms are a St Christopher medal that belonged to one of her sons whose plane was shot down during WW2; a silver threepenny piece; and the navy badge worn by the other of her sons who was killed during the war, in the Battle of Crete.

NOVEMBER - a Finished Object That is not a Sock! - This is the cardigan I have just finished. (Actually, looking at mine next to the picture of the real thing, I realise that I have made a mistake in the sewing up which will require fifteen minutes rectification).
It's the cabled cardigan by Norah Gaughan (whose designs I love) from Vigue Knitting Fall 2006. Instead of knitting it in a wool/alpaca mix which I would never be cold enough to wear, I used the cotton/acrylic mix I have mentioned before, Stonewash by Elle. I'm not sure how many balls I used (me bad). It was a surprisingly quick knit, the scarf thing round the front took the longest. (This was what the Diamond Patch Jumper morphed into. I did rectify the mistake in the sewing, and it looks fab on - I wore it a couple of days before Christmas and was very pleased with it. I may still knit the Diamond Patch Jumper in something else, but smaller!)

I;ve just realised that I have given the last post of each month, not the first, but for December I will give the first:

DECEMBER - Saturday Sky - We had a weekend of running hither and yon. Grocery and Christmas shopping on Saturday for me, then Baby Bear had this sleepover birthday party (far more convenient for them to be sleepovers when it is a half hour drive into the back of beyond to pick them up!) She did unusually well for a sleepovers - I believe she got a whole five hours sleep this time! (Plus a Saturday Sky picture - I have been slack about taking these but at least I seem to be managing one a month!)

Next year - well, it will be full of more knitting, more pictures, more textile art, and dressmaking - I have recovered my dressmaking mojo with the weight loss and am gradually doing over my entire wardrobe - filled two bags with Fat Clothes for charity last night, bought a few in my current size in the sales, and am about to embark upon dressmaking in slightly smaller sizes (or very adjustable things!)

Christmas Day Sky

I haven't done a Saturday Sky for a while, but here is a Christmas Day Sky. It rained and was bitterly cold all day, which we welcomed because it gave us some respite from bushfires and searing heat. Then this rainbow came out at the end of the day and seemed to symbolise so much about Christmas.

Incidentally, Wombat, aged 10, took this with my camera, all I have done is sharpen the edges a bit.