Craft Enabled, Domestically Disabled

A book review

Just finished Unraveling, which some of you might be into reading. 

Butterfly sweater

Years ago-- I can't recall how many and I can't find any pics from back in the day--I designed a cardigan sweater that has a built-in cape on top of it. This is entirely because I cannot figure out shawl wearing for anything short of the prom--shawls don't work well for me with having to carry stuff around. However, with this one I can move the strap of my purse underneath the cape and still have that capelike effect. It kind of looks like something old-fashioned. 

However, it looked a little....dull... and plain. (Alas, I don't seem to have any photographs around to prove this and I didn't bother to take any beforehand.) So I got the bright idea to make butterfly appliques to sew onto the thing. I love blue morpho butterflies, so I spent a fair amount of time designing and spinning yarn to try to replicate the colors in a blue morpho (blues and purples). You can see the yarn here circa 2014. 

I looked at various applique patterns online and then had some difficulties with them, so it became an unfinished object project. But per someone I'm acquainted with saying we should work on our unfinished projects (hers burned in a fire, so....), I decided to work on one for my Christmas vacation. I just finished it on the last day of. It's kind of hilarious that I thought it was going to take me something like three days and it took 16. I ended up taking out the appliques that weren't working, redoing other ones, and spending a lot of time making similar butterflies in different sizes. The tiniest of butterflies worked well in crochet, but the larger ones really needed to be knitted to look decent. I ended up using these patterns for the smaller butterflies. 

I also had a terrible time making the giant butterfly on the back piece. I couldn't find any patterns that really worked for what I was doing and decided to adapt this one (worked in the round) into something flat. This did not go so well on the upper wings, as I could NOT replicate them looking exactly mirror image the same in flat stockinette. I redid them something like 5 times apiece, having drastically different weird angles and sizes not matching and god knows what, before finally deciding "Hey, these are around the same size, gonna just go with this." Perfect is the enemy of the good, etc. 

See, here's a blue morpho to compare the yarn to.

Insert pandemic whine of "I can't take photos of my own damn back" here.

Front's not much easier to photograph alone either, sigh. 

But hey, after an estimated.... seven?....years, it's finally done! 

The patchwork sweater

So the "Harry Styles Cardigan" has been sweeping the Internet for a few months. I honestly think the thing is kinda.... not that attractive, so I didn't pay much attention to it. However, I did see this girl's videos on the Internet about making her own, and then doing a crowdsourced one, and hers looked a whole lot cuter than the original. So that's been my "holiday sweater" (har) for 2020, albeit not Christmassy. 

I have a lot of chunky weird "art" handspun yarn I haven't really done much of anything with over the years, so I thought this would be a good project to use that up on. And I used up probably 90% of it, which is really cool. It's a good thing I tended to use the same sorts of colors so they went together!

I originally went off Liv's pattern, as it were, for this rather than the original cardigan. That one does 5x5 squares, hers does 4x4, which I much preferred--more variety, easier to make squares block to 4x4, etc.

I did them in size 10 needles and however many stitches/rows it took to get 4x4 squares--usually casting on 14 to 16 stitches, depending on how thick/thin that particular skein was spun. 

Around the 11 minute mark she talks about what she did for hers. 

She has a 2x6 for each front of the cardigan, but I did 3x6 because I have the Tits o' Doom. Otherwise I followed her pattern of 4x6 for the arms and 5x6 for the back. 

And then after sewing the fronts and sides together and doing pinning, the sleeves were way too long and I had to remove two rows of squares off them. 

I ended up reappointing them onto the bottoms of the front and back pieces, and creating two secret pockets on the front.

Those pockets hold my new giant cell phone very nicely, or anything else of length. It's the pink and hot pink/teal patch together as one pocket. 

I had already planned to have two pockets on the sides, which I made out of the yarn where I didn't have enough left to make 4x4 squares out of them. I ended up sewing them in at an angle and pinning them down a bit on the seams, so things won't fall out.

 

I whipstitched around the edges of the pockets once both sides were together to close it all together. The side pockets pretty much fit like a hoodie. 

So I have 3x7 on the fronts, 4x4 on the sleeves, and 5x7 on the back, in the end. 

As for the ribbing:

On the sleeves, I needed to shrink down the edges of them so they fit more human-like (my arms are about 18 inches long, so a 20 inch long sleeve did not work, sigh), so I did some decreases. 

1. Pick up 14 stitches per each square, for 28 inches total, with size 10 needles.
2. Knit in 2x2 rib on row 2.
3. Switch to size 8 needles, 2x2 rib again.
4. [p2tog, k2] pattern on all stitches on next row.
5. [p2tog, k1] pattern on all stitches on next row.
6. Continue in p1, k1 ribbing until there are 2 inches of ribbing, bind off. 

(Sadly, that's the one thing I'm not happy with with these because the length will be fine most of the time, and then somehow my wrists still end up sticking out too much when I start typing, once the whole thing was sewn together and done. Darn it. I am out of that yarn so I might have to fudge something to make them longer or whatever.)

On the button band/front ribbing area:

1. Pick up 16 inches per each square with size 10 needles, staring on the front from the bottom towards the top. 
2. I planned on using one inch-ish sized buttons AND I was running low on the yarn I wanted to use for the band, so I only did 1.5 inches of 2x2 ribbing.
3. Since the top square on the front of the jacket was a little choke-y to put button band on, I did cast on all the way up, but I decreased by 4 sts every time I was going back down the buttonband from top to bottom, including the first full row. 
4. On row 8 (going from top to bottom again), I bound off. 
5. For the button holes (hah), I put safety pins where I wanted to put the buttons (basically at the top/bottom of each square) and around those areas, on row 3 I p2tog'd on the designated rib area. On row 4, I cast on another stitch where the hole was to get it back to 2 sts in the ribbing again. I have had enough issues with buttonholes in knitting that I just make a tiny hole and then stretch it to have the buttons go through. 

I decided to use all of my odd large buttons that either have one match or no matches on this thing, because what the heck. 

I ended up pinning/sewing down the collar on the top square since it was too high up/choking-ish had I included it for real in the buttonband.

Since I was running low on the matching yarns, I just single crocheted around the edge of the neck and the bottom of the sweater rather than adding more anything else. 

Anyway, now it's done:

It's very large and warm, turned into more of a coat, and weighs like 50 pounds to carry around while finishing it off. 

Update, a few days later: Okay, the too-short sleeves REALLY bothered me, so I took out the original ribbing and did 2 inches of ribbing in size 10 DPN's with the leftover yarn from the butterfly sweater, then did the same decrease thing as I did before on the sleeves. It looks a lot better.

 

Also my mother complained that i "just stuck a wig on my head" for the last shot :P

 

This is mostly done...Garden of Chaos!

Ugh, I haven't updated this in over a year? Good god. Uploading pictures is such a pain in the ass that I take them and never upload them.

Anyway, here's what I've been up to lately: my third gallery show is up. 

 
Remember the Summer of Flowers last year that was taking forever to upload? I did finish that and sewed them altogether into a shawl.

My mermaid costume from a few years ago. And I finally did a self-portrait in mosaic. 

Mosaics from the last few years. Big thanks to my friend Melinda who actually does woodworking for figuring out how to put backs on them.

And here's the last four years' worth of "ugly" holiday sweaters.

The last batch of ceramics I made that weren't stolen off my patio this year: 

Since this year's theme is "Garden of Chaos," one area's dedicated to flowers and the other's dedicated to undersea gardens:



This is called "Octopus's Garden" because there's sixteen octopuses in it. My friends Meg and Jamie contributed to it, and I am ah, still adding pieces onto it because I spent so much time making the first display piece (and then I found boogie boards at a thrift store in Santa Cruz) that I just don't feel quite done yet. Will keep adding more things later.  

 

 

 

The finished fairy garden

Now it has a fuzzy, vine-and-leaf decorated fence around it, and a few other additions.

Making a fairy garden

So there is a state fair competition to make a fairy garden. Seriously, that exists. I happen to know someone who totally does that sort of thing, so we're working on one together. Here are the results so far:

Here's the base, which has to be 12x12. Meg provided me the yarn and I knit/crocheted a cover for it to make a shaggy forest floor. The base brown/green yarn I designed and Meg spun and then I crocheted around the edge.

Meg did this amazing mushroom hill/fairy house, and I did the underglaze on it and then she did the top layer of glaze. It came out really well.

This is the base piece--I used flower stamps all over it, then used a foam donut to make it more of a holder-type thing. I painted on red, purple, orange and yellow underglaze and then Meg used celadon glaze on top of that. It came out amazingly coppery and a perfect holder for the mushroom hill.

I can't really explain this one so much other than it was another slab draped over a foam donut. The weird blobs are things Meg made with drippings, which I hand painted underglaze on to attempt to make them flower-ish.

A baby labyrinth that I cut out of the tile stamp..

And here's where we glued the pieces on, and added little fairies out of yarn, and glued some nature-y bits and twigs and stuff onto t.

I may add some kind of fence so I can wrap vines and leave around it (and also to hopefully hold the pieces in just in case). But it's pretty wild and wooly so far.

More spinning

My second gallery show is now online

Rainbow of Chaos.

 

Did some yarn spinning

 

More handspun

This... turned into this.
There is also this.

And this.