Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Simple stripes

Sometimes, simple stripes are the best!
This sweater is actually one of my first creations. It was sewn before I started blogging and J is finally old enough to wear it.  It's just a simple raglan sweater, but I really love it.
Don't you agree???

Not much more to add. Just some more pics of the boy and his bear...

Saturday, November 15, 2014

A Frozen hat

The result of my experiment! A wintery hat for M. As soon as she put it on, she burst into singing "Let it go! Let it go!" Indeed, it does remind of the movie Frozen!
M loves it. She couldn't wait until it was finished (which is why it is a bit on the small side - it's hard to keep adding rows when an impatient 6-year old asks you every five minutes "When are you finished Mum?"). She put it on as soon as it came of the needles and has worn it non stop since then (yes, even indoors).
Inspiration came from this pin. I love how the pattern slowly fades away into the white. In hindsight, I should have used finer yarn, in order to let the pattern come out better. O well, that's a good reason to dye some more yarn....
A big fat pom pom tops the hat like a giant snowball. I used up half a ball of wool for it, but it's worth it!

Below you find the pattern that I used.
The hat is 96 stitches in the round, which results in 6 repetitions of the pattern.

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Experimenting...

It's been very quiet here on the blog. That usually signifies that real life is not so quiet. Indeed, life has been very busy lately and I haven't had any time to sew, let alone to blog.
Unfortunately, this situation is going to last a while. We're going to renovate the attic to create three bed rooms for our kids. Currently, it is used as our office, sewing room and storage space. We're in the middle of sorting stuff, getting rid of the things we don't need anymore (which is A LOT), and storing everything else -including my sewing necessities- elsewhere in the house.
I don't know how long it will take before I can set up my new sewing room. I guess at least a month or two. In the meantime, I'll resort to an other medium: knitting!

For my latest knitting project, I did a fun experiment in the kitchen. At least, I thought it was fun! My husband did not!
I hand dyed some wool; using food coloring, vinegar and a microwave. As you can imagine, the latter combination was NOT appreciated by my husband! I must admit, it looked and smelled as if I was brewing some toxic concoction. At some point during my experiment there even was a small explosion in the microwave, covering its whole inside in blue spatters. But really, it was a super cool, simple and satisfying experiment.
There are a lot of tutorials on wool dyeing on the internet. Since they are all slightly different, I decided to wing it and follow the instructions loosely. I soaked the (pure wool) yarn, put it in a bowl with water, food coloring and a few spoons of vinegar, put the stuff in the microwave, and let it simmer for a few minutes, until the water looked quite clear (or, in one case, the stuff exploded - probably because I used too little water). Then I rinsed the yarn, and hung it out to dry. Only a few hours later, the first stitches of my new hat were on put on the needles...

Curious about the end result? Stay tuned!