On the go #10

While reading initially appealed less to me in January, the creative itch for once persisted well after the Christmas making frenzy, resulting in me starting a couple of new things or continuing with the old.

At Christmas the subject of relaxation activities came up. You probably know what I mean: puzzles, coloring books for adults, diamond painting, etc.
My niece mentioned she had started learning to embroider, to which my aunt commented that she found it difficult to start such a hobby if it did not yield anything useful. I then remarked that nowadays you see a lot of embroidered accents on clothing, which are nice.
This conversation kind of stuck in my head and I think the internet has a tracker in my head somewhere because not long after I came across this photo of Knitted Bliss .

Of course I started to itch to try this, but I wanted to make the hat myself first. Ideal project to use up some of my ridiculously large yarn stash. Now it turns out that the hat in the photo above comes with a free pattern: Classic Ribbed Hat van Purl Soho

So I immediately dug up my first skein from my stash and started knitting. Super simple pattern, very relaxing and requires little thought! So this one was actually knitted in no time.

In the meantime, I also started looking for the dissolving stitch stabilizer from the tutorial of Knitted Bliss. I needed to Google a while to find a proper translation to Dutch, but eventually found what I would need in a local craft store.

However, I haven’t started embroidering yet. I have started knitting my second hat. I found the first one so easy to knit away on, that I promptly cast on a second one for my long train journeys to and from work!

While I was taking lonely skeins of yarn from my stash for the hats, I was once again confronted with how ridiculously many boxes of yarn I have. Because these are in the attic, I am not confronted with them every day and can therefore easily forget about them. But things are really getting a bit out of hand (kind of like with all my books, lol).
So I decided that I urgently needed to start another new project to make a small but sure dent in it.

Now I really love purple and have many skeins of purple yarn in my stash. Some of these looked to be the exact same shade, however, daylight proved that there was a clear difference, so my quickly formed idea for a sweater for myself had to be revised.

I saved this pattern by Andi Satterlund a while ago. It’s for a cropped sweater, so it doesn’t require as much yarn as a regular sweater.
My plan is to try to knit the sweater in my favorite purple color as much as possible (the one with more red in it) and if necessary I can switch to the other (darker, more bluish) purple for the scalloped edges.

While I was still looking in my stash to see if I had any more of that red-purple yarn, I found a project that I had actually forgotten. Whoops.

When I made all the Harry Potter related knitting projects two Christmases ago with my knitting mill, I also made a headband for myself, with – yes – the red-purple wool.
The reason for the colours was my winter coat, which – yes – is also purple.

The headband was worn a few times, but then I decided I preferred a hat. So I also made a hat for myself on the knitting mill. My plan was to embroider stripes on it after all the rounds had been knitted, to mimic the checked fabric of my jacket. But in the end it didn’t happen. The unfinished hat disappeared into a corner somewhere.

I did debate for a moment whether I should unravel it to have some extra meters of purple yarn for my sweater, in the end I didn’t. I started finishing the hat with what I had in mind. The headband however might disappear under the seam ripper if I run out of meters of purple yarn, since I don’t wear it anyway.

When I brought the light blue houndstooth fabric to sewing class at the end of last year to use for a charity project , I received some comments about why I wasn’t going to use that fabric for something for myself. I was a bit taken aback, because I didn’t immediately find that material something for me. Plus, I had no idea what I was going to make with it.

“But, Charlotte! A jacket!” I was told with a sigh.

Right, okay then, lol.
After I made the houndstooth bag to sell for charity, that comment stuck in my mind. So I started Pinteresting.
That’s how I came across the black and white houndstooth jacket and yes, I could see myself wearing that something like that. I’m still unsure about the colour of my houndstooth fabric, but intrigued enough to give it a shot.

So my first order of business during the first sewing lessons of 2024 was to create my pattern.
I started with a basic pattern for a blazer from an old magazine, my personal size chart and the various Pinterest photos I could find of the jacket. It’s apparently a sold out Shein model. Makes me feel a lot less guilty about copying 😉
Together with the help of the sewing teacher and a lot of cutting and pasting, I created a paper pattern for the jacket. Now on to cutting and marking the fabric!

Oh, and apparently vests like this are in, because I came across this one in a fancy shop. Yes, hip and trendy, that’s how I know myself, LOL!