Thursday, February 27, 2014

Snow in spring

Outside it's almost spring: snowdrops, crocuses, even daffodils are all over the place. Nature is one month ahead of schedule here in the Netherlands. Despite (or maybe because) of us having the mildest winter ever, I made this snowy sweater for my son. Inspired by an ombre shirt I bought for myself, I looked for ombre fabric to create something similar. I couldn't find any fabric, but then I pinned this picture, and knew what to do with it....
I tweaked the picture a bit in photoshop and then had it printed on a fat quarter of knit fabric by the Dutch company Exprezzit. I only printed such a small amount, since it was the first time I ordered anything there, and I've been disappointed by the quality of other companies before. However, I'm  really pleased with the quality. The fabric is quite thin, but very soft. The colors are vibrant, although they didn't exactly come out as envisioned (there's a bit of a pink haze on the top trees; I blame that on my editing though). The best thing is, when prewashing it, the fabric hardly shrunk and the colors didn't fade at all.  
The tree fabric was used for the front panel of a raglan sweater, using a pattern from Ottobre. 
I color blocked the sleeves to emulate the ombre effect, using some old t shirts and dark blue jersey. 
The same blue jersey was used for  the back panel, bottom band and cuffs.

For the side tag, I used one of the fancy stitches on my machine to create a little snowflake. Ever since I got my machine, I've been looking for reasons to use those stitches, and I've finally found a very good one. I'm definitely going to do this more often. Love the detail...  
 So there you have it, a snowy sweater for spring... Fortunately, it's rather big on him, so with a bit of luck it will still fit next season.
 

13 comments:

  1. This is so cool again! On seeing the pics I thought you stamped it with bleech again, somehow :)

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  2. This looks great! Thx for the tip, might try exprezzit sometime.

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  3. Amazing sweater; the picture looks great and the sleeves work so well!

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  4. Please, please, please: send me an email at naehconnection@gmail.com
    You won't regret it! I'm sure...

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  5. I just want to say, I love your projects. Looking trough your posts I realized a few times that I had seen some of your posts in the past, but I was not following you yet, shame on me. I corrected my mistake immediatly.

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    1. Dankjewel! Leuk dat je mijn blog nu volgt. Jouw blog kende ik ook nog niet. Ik ga je zeker volgen!

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  6. Deze blijft één van mijn favorieten van 2014, prachtig hoe je dit deed!!!

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  7. Leuk gedaan, maar jammer dat je andermans foto gebruikt.

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