Dress fever

I fell in love with this Mango dress. But. Even if I were not on clothes shopping diet I doubt that I would pay 90 euros from polyester dress, however nice it might be. But perhaps I could make a haul to local silk shop and dig through the bits and pieces basket?

Still in love…

Another one, I’ve been planning this literally for years:

It is so me! And ooh, SATC the Movie in the theatres very soon! Those clothes *swoon*…

This is where I live

Since the Chevron Sweater has two more boring stripes to go, I might post off topic as well… …so here’s a picture heavy post about my neighborhood. Yep, it’s spring here in Helsinki!

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Nominated for the most boring knitting pattern in the world…

…Chevron Sweater.

If somebody wonders why there is nothing happening in this blog lately, you can blame the Chevron Sweater. I decided to concentrate on knitting it and just it. And because it is boring, I’m not too surprised that all the other activities seem to be so much more tempting…

I usually don’t concentrate on one knit, but this one was in too great UFO danger zone, especially considering the yarn investments (I tried first with Yeoman suggested in the pattern, then with this Colourmart silk - and end up ordering another green for one stripe). Silk yarn in its all loveliness is not really fun to knit. I don’t mind the unstretchiness of it, but it splits like there is no tomorrow. And talk about hiding those split plies to smooth silk surface…

But I’m quite curious about the result, so there is a positive side on this project, too!

chevron2 

The first sleeve is almost finished. I have to say that half of the body is knitted with these sleeves, so no wonder it takes time…

I had a yarn diet, too, but I slipped a bit to get some motivation to knit the chevron. I will make another hippy pair of socks with this lovely and quite tranquil shade of Silk Garden Lite (#2021).

silkgarden21

There was also some Wendy’s yarns on my LYS, I especially liked Supreme, mercerized, but not too hard cotton. This lovely cool beige shade with mauve undertones really caught my eye. Cardigan, perhaps? I have only one ball of this for swatching purposes… …just waiting for inspiration!

supreme

Greens and browns

This Chevron Sweater has involved more frogging than knitting - at least it feels like that! The beige yarn is a bit unbalanced and it did not knit up nicely to chevron pattern. So I frogged and tried to make directional M1:s to improve the look. Marginal improvement. Another setback was with colours. When the jade green stripe was ready, I decided that the intensity and lightness of those two first greens were too similar. So what next: some frogging and yarn shopping. Unfortunately the new green I ordered was almost identical shade to the original, so no improvement in here, either. Luckily I like the combination more now, that lime green stripe saves the combo.

I knit the sleeve now, flat because I did not have a circular short enough. And why did not I think this: the unbalanced yarn looks so much better knitted back and forth! Not perfect, but significantly better. Should I frog the body piece or what :-D.

Another slowly progressing knit is the cashmere sweater for my husband. And now I have lost my faith to the math I made when calculating the shrinkage of the yarn (Colourmart oiled cashmere). My original swatch is lost. Should probably knit a new one and calculate again.

Relatively fast is my latest design, a summer top from oddballs of cotton; mercerized and unmercerized; white, beige and couple of shades of brown with hint of rose. I knit up separate sections with different stitch patterns, pick up stitches, crochet the pieces together. This is so much fun and I really wait to see the result. Should resemble distantly this, the middle piece has two folds on top, creating the A-line.

Updating Selma pattern

I just updated Selma pattern. When translating it to Finnish I encountered two errors, a typo and one missing technique name - and from one comment from readers I got the idea of laying out the somewhat lengthy cable setup row differently. Please download the new version, if you consider knitting this!

If I got one piece of apparel, anything I wanted…

… from this S/S ready to wear collections I would definitely take a full printed skirt from Prada. The fairy prints for this spring were just otherworldly. I love the Miuccia Prada touch for this utterly feminine piece.

There are some real gems in the more affordable Miu Miu line, too. Perhaps some day…

Image from Style.com

Summer top

I really haven’t been knitting too much lately. But one little summery top is now finished, again my own design.

Marshmallow Top

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Orange, pink - and things from far east

I really don’t understand why didn’t I recall this UFO from last summer. Perfect for this years Project Spectrum first colour theme!

sunskirt.jpg

I had few stripes of it done and the rest of it did not take too long, now I need some pink or orange cotton voile to line it perfectly.

I do remember, though, how I got this crazy idea of pink-orange striped sunskirt. I was browsing (once again) Style.com and found this:
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Selma Cape - a free pattern

Phew, it took quite a lot of work but here it is - a pattern for Selma Cape. And it is free, you can even distribute it in printed form (prints and photocopies of print from the PDF), just don’t change the pattern. I also noticed that in my pictures of Selma, there was no decent side view, so here we go:

selma5.jpg

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A fresh pair of socks!

And the spring brought something new to show: a tangy pair of socks from zesty handpainted Mokkasukka yarn. And look, there is a ray of sun on the set, really!

harlequin6.jpg

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