Not On Your Tintype!

A long time ago, Mom sent away for a sewing pattern, probably from a magazine ad.

It was for a lovely owl-shaped pillow, and so probably was intended for me. But she never made it.

I got around to reading through the pattern yesterday. It called for fabric, and felt, and sewing tools that I haven't heard of since a long ago class in Home Economics. Still, it seemed pretty straightforward.

Then I got to the instructions for the feathers.

That's right. Cut out 500 of these, sew them together in pairs, turn them inside out, gather them slightly, and sew them - one at a time - onto the owl's body.

Can you imagine? I can't, and I'm sure neither could Mom. I've never looked forward more to giving something away.

A Pause, and a Restart

The latest legacy project has been on hold while I waited for the buttons to arrive. It's bad luck to make buttonholes before you have the buttons. And now I do, so that will start up again soon.

Meanwhile, I ditched two different pairs of socks I was working on. These, because all of the remaining yarn had been nibbled at (long before I got it and quarantined it, there's just a limit to how many ends I want to deal with). And these (the second one down), because although working the pattern is interesting, I just never like the results. Instead, I've cast on two new pair, and finished a toe apiece.

Not Turtles All the Way Down

How does the doll I am knitting stand up, you ask? Extremely well! I am shocked at how well it stands and keeps its balance, even knowing that the skirt acts like the sides of a trimaran.

But she has a secret. An alter ego, if you will...

And she stands securely as well.

Needles: US 5 (3.75 mm) DPNs, US 7 (4.5mm) 16-inch circular

Yarn: Knit Picks Brava in Almond, Black, and Currant, plus assorted acrylic worsted scraps

Pattern: Susan B. Anderson's Top-Down Seamless Petticoat Dolls, from her book Topsy-Turvy Inside-Out Knit Toys, although my copy was included in issue 120 of Simply Knitting in the UK, and is just called Topsy-Turvy Doll

And because I know someone will want to see exactly how it works, here is a photo of the joining:

And here is the photo I drew on before making the face, which was exceedingly helpful in placing the stitches:

Legacy Yarn: Tigrenki

I'm knitting up the leftover yarn from these socks into socks for myself. I thought I'd have enough for anklets, at least, with orange toes and an orange stripe around the top of the cuff. Amazingly, it looks like I'll have enough for a full pair of socks!

Still completely impossible to get clear focus on this yarn!

I've jazzed up the cuffs with a 2x2 rib variation I learned ages ago: every 4th round you right-twist all the knit-2s. Easy-peasy to do and keep track of, and it looks like normal ribbing if you decide to fold the cuffs down.

Legacy Project: An Italian Hem

After some consideration, I decided the cast off I wanted to use is the Italian (or Invisible, or Tubular) Cast Off. It's best done to finish off 1x1 ribbing, but I had to learn the hard way that you can't do it on twisted rib. Once I worked the set-up rows in plain 1x1 ribbing, and reminded myself of the steps, it was smooth sailing.

I really like how it looks.

I just wish there wasn't quite so much of it.

When I start the front-and-neck edging, I will start making up my mind about fasteners. Pewter clasps? Elephant buttons? Boring blue buttons?

Legacy project: Embroidery, Crochet, and Kntting, Oh My!

This was a total magic trick. I know I've been making fun of all the different steps and skills involved in this project, but the end result is completely impossible: knitting on to a piece of woven fabric.

First up, the embroidery. I was supposed to do this before seaming, but I was worried that the seam would eat up partial chains. Doing it after worked just fine. Three strands of floss, an embroidery needle sharp enough to pierce fabric, but sturdy enough not to be bent -- this fabric is a heavy twill with a satin lining -- and off we go. The instructions specify 4-5 stitches to the inch, and I wing it across one piece of fabric before measuring. Nope. I cannot eyeball distances and I know that. Back it comes (chain stitch, is there anything easier to rip out?). I measure off inches with pins across the bottom edge of the fabric, prepared to count forever. Fortunately, it only takes two inches of chains for me to realize that I can measure my stitches against the serge stitching on the edge of the fabric. One chain to two serge stitches, and I'm off again, removing the pins as I go, and finishing the whole length in no time.

Next, some crochet! The hook size was specified, and although my crochet hooks are lettered rather than numbered and seem vague about their equivalent millimeters, I have the approximate right size. I don't have an afghan hook small enough, so that variant was nipped right in the bud. One single crochet in each chain, one single crochet in every other edge stitch of the knitted section. I did have to refresh my memory on single crochet. I make a lot of dish scrubbies using half-double-crochet (which is not the same as single crochet, get over it, math and language nerds), and my hands now automatically do that stitch unless I carefully watch them at the beginning.

Finally, time to knit! The instructions gave explicit directions -- but no pictures -- on how to hold the fabric and which direction to start from. I had to stop thinking I knew what they wanted and do exactly as instructed. And lo and behold, on the next row I was working twisted rib onto fabric!

I've done the math, and I have enough yarn to do the entire edge in the same yarn. Ordinarily that would argue for mitering the corners and doing it all at once, but I simply do not have enough, or long enough, needles. So, again as instructed, I will work the bottom ribbing and then the side ribbing.

Doll face

The do-over is done and the socks now fit like all my other socks - yay! A good soak removed most of the kink from the yarn.

Meanwhile, I've been stricken with a desire to knit dolls.

She just needs a face and hair. Hair is hard, and has been my doll downfall in the past.

But First, Mattress Stitch!

Back to the legacy project. I was wrong. Embroidery wasn't next up, sewing the side seams was. The yarn I bought for the ribbing proved to be too thick for seaming. But any thin yarn would do, since with mattress stitch, it would barely show. See?

And here's a bit at the end so you can see what color I wound up using to sew the seams.

There was a long enough tail on the cuffs to seam them up with the original yarn, which is nice in case the eventual wearer wants to turn back the cuffs.

Now can I embroider?

Do-Over

When I packed up my wool socks for the summer, I noticed that there was a pair I had not worn once all winter. I thought about it, and realized they didn't fit well and never had. I had messed around with my standard sock pattern to try to improve it and had instead achieved the opposite. But this was six years ago! Was it too late to re-do them? Well, if I wasn't wearing them much anyway, what did I have to lose?

So I picked out the woven in ends, ripped out the knitting, and re-wound the yarn. Now I am re-knitting them to my standard pattern. Since I initially made them too long and narrow, I seem to have enough yarn to make them shorter and wider.

The yarn, however, looks like this:

So the finished sock looks dreadful:

I can only hope that blocking returns the yarn to its former smooth self. Half a sock to go, and then we will find out.

I Figured Out Something Everyone Already Knows!

Time to sew my knitting. The knit fabric was curling, so I wet-blocked it and started to pin it out. The yarn bloomed and grew, something I've read about, but it was a first for me. Fortunately I had the schematic, so I patted it into place as close to the size I wanted as possible. After it dried, I pinned the knitted fabric to the woven fabric as specified, and sewed. The result was... uninspiring.

Halfway through the second one, it occurred to me that hand-basting it first would solve all the problems I was having with the knit fabric shifting around. As an added bonus, I stopped sticking myself on pins! It was tremendously easier to ease in the extra fullness as well.

I realize all the sewers already know about hand-basting, but for a while today I felt like I'd invented anti-gravity. It was completely worth the tedious time it took to pick out the first seam and a half.

 

 After hand-basting, machine-sewing the seams was a snap, and I am very pleased with the result.

Next up, embroidery!

Crayons

Finished my colorful project. Every time I picked it up, it was like opening a new box of crayons. When I started looking for a pattern for this yarn, which was a bit of an impulse buy, I was astonished at the number of people who paired it with something else to "tone it down." I bought it for the colors, I had no intention of toning it down. This person did I really nice shawl out of a single skein of this yarn, but I avoid triangle shapes when I can. I found a better shape from the same designer, but swapped out freely to get what I wanted - yarn-over instead of knit-into-front-and-back increases, stockinette sections instead of garter. I did about an inch of a picot bind off before deciding I wasn't loving it, and used the double-chain bind off instead, for maximum stretch.

I then lost nearly all my love for it when it came to blocking. It was my brain, not the knitting. I pulled out all the pins and walked away for a few hours. When I came back it took me no time at all to block out the shape I wanted. The wait made the garter tab stick up more, but it will settle down with wear.

It's pretty clear that this is going to look fabulous over a black clergy shirt, so I have gifted it to KD.

Needles: US 6 (4.00 mm)
Yarn: the utterly wonderful Cascade Yarns Heritage Paints in Rainbow Mix, which I bought from the Simply Socks Yarn Company entirely so that I could get the free project bag on offer. In fact, I've just bought another skein to obtain a different bag; this could become a problem.
Pattern: improvised well past the point of just calling it modifications

Knitting plus Sewing, Because Life Is Strange Now

The next legacy project is going to be... interesting. I think it was a kit. I have the pattern - and thank goodness, because it's not on Ravelry. There was no yarn with the project. Fortunately, the knitting is nearly complete. I couldn't match the  beautiful shade of blue that was used, so I bought some navy blue that at least doesn't swear with it. I also bought some matching DMC floss. Floss? Well.

There are two sleeves with side pieces -

- which get attached to the central fabric piece using a (gasp!) sewing machine, and then seamed up like any side and sleeve. Since mattress stitch is invisible, my navy yarn won't show.

At that point all that is left is the knit border around the bottom, neck, and front edges of the fabric. So how do you knit on to fabric? According to the instructions, it involves -  brace yourself - embroidery. That's right. You take the above-mentioned embroidery floss and a needle and make a line of chain stitch around the edges of the fabric, just inside the selvedge.  In case that's not enough mixed fabric arts for your day, you then take a crochet hook and yarn and work a row of single crochet into the chain stitch. Then, and only then, do you whip out your knitting needle, knit into the top of the single crochet stitches, and knit the rest of the border. (Wait. What if I used an afghan needle and Tunisian crochet? Then the stitches would already be on a needle for knitting.)

Head spinning yet? My sister chose to work regular twisted rib cuffs on the sleeves rather than the odd-but-interesting border pattern called for. I just worked up a little of it to be sure it didn't somehow magically look like twisted rib. Nope. So at least once I get through all the mixed fabric arts I can just work some soothing twisted rib for the border.

I might miter the corners. Can one do that in ribbing? It's tempting. It will eventually need buttons. Unless I sew on clasps. What's a little hand-sewing at that point? I draw the line at installing a zipper. That's in my future, along with learning to steek.

The Current Rotation

I'm working on some socks, which I originally intended for DH, but there wasn't enough yarn, so I'm remaking them for me (love the yarn, love the pattern, love the result).

So of course I have cast on another sock, trying out basketweave socks with separate colors, using leftover yarn, instead of the (to me) muddied result of using a variegated yarn.

I'm also working on something colorful -

- and something with barely any color changes at all.

So of course, I'm about to start something new.

Someone Else's Turn to Sew

Once the waistband was finished, everything else was a breeze. Sewed the side seams, finished the strap edges, hemmed it, sewed on the pocket. I hate hems when the fabric gets wider as it gets longer. The solution seems to be small hems, cutting off the excess. I can see that wouldn't work for a child's garment, though.

The pocket turned out to be easier than I had thought because I had misunderstood the directions.

I wonder if one is supposed to remove the basting stitches?

All done.

Legacy Project: Woven Front Sweater

We left our readers with live stitches at an unfinished hem, one sleeve cap, and no sleeves. Finishing the last few inches of the hem went so fast I have no record of it. Attaching the sleeve cap was a matter of matching up stripes on the front and employing mattress stitch.

The seaming fell, by brilliant design, at a place in the color work that made it absolutely disappear.

I initially thought that the ends of the sleeve cap ended at the start of the underarm gusset, but when I realized I had exactly the same number of stitches for both, I attached them straight across.

Time for the sleeves. I began by marking the top center of the cap and then picking up every loop in sight at the edge of the cap, making sure I had the same amount front and back. I started knitting, and within an inch I knew it was too many stitches, because the fabric was puckering around the picked-up seam. I compared my stitch total to other worsted weight sweaters in the same size range. That was interesting because I was comparing my sleeve to cuff-up sleeves and had to decide that I wanted the number of stitches just before any shoulder/cap shaping. Yep, definitely too many. So I picked up every other stitch, and then knit, adding the missing stitch after every 3rd stitch, which resulted in the 4 out of 5 stitches that is so often recommended, and that worked out fine.  Another inch along and I realized I needed to go down a needle size.

Then it was time to decide on length. I looked at the average length of my comparison sleeves to decide what length I wanted. I looked at my row gauge. I did math. I wound up wanting to decrease 20 stitches, and halfway through decreasing every 6th row I realized my math was off. Before I could rip back, KD suggested just decreasing the second half every 4th row, and that worked out perfectly. I added a stripe of color to tie in with the color work in the pattern, matching the reverse stockinette used. I worked 2 inches of 1x1 purl in the next smaller size needle, and then tried several bind offs before realizing the one I wanted.

I love this bind off. It goes by so many names - tubular, invisible, 1x1, Italian. I think of it as the cuff bind off I could never figure out on store-bought sweaters. How do they DO that? Well, I’m doing it, but I still don’t know how. Unlike Kitchener Stitch, which I’m an old hand at, I don’t really understand how what I’m doing is creating the result. Just like my beginner days with Kitchener, I have to follow the instructions by rote, trusting that someone out there knows what they’re doing. Also like my early years of Kitchener, I have to be careful: it matters that the loose loop of yarn being drawn through the needles stays in front of and below the knitting needles.

Needles: US 7, US 6, US 5
Yarn: Berroco Vintage in Cracked Pepper and Dried Plum
Pattern: who knows
Destination: the box, unless someone knows who it would fit. It's a 40" chest and 18" sleeves, meant for 2-3" of positive ease. It's got a turtleneck-small neck. And I still have some ends to weave in.

That's Better

So much going on at waistbands! Finally this half has everything going off in the right direction and facing the right way. Now I just have to do it again on the other half. And I'm running out of time, someone else has put in a request for the table.

Legacy: Four-Color Socks

For this project, I had the yarn in a bag marked "socks for" the recipient. But no pattern. Four skeins of gorgeous color, fingering weight, washable wool. I searched on four-color socks in Ravelry and came up with a pattern in a book that I own, and that I know my sister owned a copy of. So it's possible she had this pattern in mind.

A lot of Ravelry commenters give this pattern grief, which is only half-deserved. Corrugated ribbing, as we have learned, can be worked in 2-row sets, working color A stitches and slipping color B, then reversing it on the next row. In practice, two such rows equal one row of knitting. So people reading through the pattern who have never done 2-color ribbing thought that the heel and toe would be comically long, when in fact they were just fine as written. That my heel flaps are a skosh long is my own fault, since I was off on the first sock by two rows and decided it was better to make them match than to rip out half a sock to fix it.

The toes, though, were another matter. The pattern is actually written in a very ambiguous way, and despite leaving clever notes for myself after the first sock, I had to figure it out all over again on the second sock.

But all in all, it was worth it. I like them a lot, and if they wind up a tad large for the recipient, they'll make nice slipper socks.

Needles: US 1½ (2.5 mm)
Yarn: a mystery Maryland Sheep and Wool purchase from another year
Pattern: Anna Tillman's Classic Fair Isle from knitted socks (which is out of print)