Legwarmer season

One good thing to be said for colder weather- time to bring out the legwarmers!
These are made out of delectable Wensleydale Longwool DK yarn, left over from a hat I made for Anthony (hence the shortness).

The camera can't really cope with all the fuzzyiness, so this is the best shot I got of the stitch pattern. It's a slipped stitch herringbone pattern, which I think is in a Barbara Walker book. I found a version of it online, and promptly lost the bit of paper I'd printed it on, so ended up unventing it.
These boots are the perfect legwarmer companions:

They have a lowered legwarmer viewing area at the back!

In their honour- I had a go at the classic "knitting in a bush" shot:

The shirt off my back

Behold! What you see here is my first ever shirt, made using the Built By Wendy pattern in her book, Sew U (this is the pattern I lifted the collar and stand from for the black tulip shirt dress.)

For a first ever shirt, I wasn't displeased, and I do wear the thing, but I'm not overjoyed either.
I cut it a size larger than I usually would, having read that it ran very small. Unfortunately I ended up having to take it in a lot at the waist to stop it from drowning me, which left the bust fit looking a bit peculiar.

Also, the fabric (another old prints shelf find from my usual shop!) creases very easily, and not in a particularly casual cool sort of a way...
(Note to self- first take pictures, then lean on things)

Still, I can't complain- I was aiming for a wearable muslin, and a practice run at making a collar and a button band. I'm very pleased with the black tulip shirt dress which came after it, and I do have a wearable shirt (albeit one which doesn't stand up to close examination)!

My weekend in pictures

Notes on Flickr...

21 September

Jammy

I was brought up on homemade jam , and it never really occurs to me to buy it in shops. So, when I opened the cupboard earlier this week to find- shock horror!- that we only had four jars left, there was only one possible solution. Shop bought blackberries.
I know, I know, it goes against the very ethos of homemade blackberry jam, but it's my absolute favorite and I just can't bring myself to buy the jam ready made. That's what living in London does to a county bumpkin.
Even I could not bring myself to buy enough little punnets to keep our toast covered until next summer, so I supplemented with shop bought plums. Here they are just after the sugar went in:The little white floating things are kernels (I cracked open some of the plum stones and extracted them). I've not added them before, but they're meant to make it yummier. We shall see...
In other news, how about these for the stripy cardie?
They fit through the button holes, which is a good start! (can you believe that picture was taken at two in the afternoon?? That's the light we've been getting lately...)

Black tulips shirtdress

I made this earlier on this summer, just in time to join Lara and Bree for the sheep day at Spitalfields. It is made from the same fabric as the Whirl Away dress, just in black with blue flowers rather than blue with white, with buttons inherited from my Grandmother.It's only the second shirt I've ever made, and I'm inordinately proud of the collar and button band! I used this pattern, but I frankensteined on the collar from the Built by Wendy shirt in her book Sew U.
It's been getting a lot of wear, I've been eying up the other pattern views...

I also learned a valuable lesson about backgrounds and skintones whilst I was photographing it. Look Ma! No hands!

HHe
I made this dress earlier on this summer, just in time to join Lara for the Sheep day in Spitalfields. It is made from the same fabric as the Whirl Away Dress, only in a different colour.

Make do and mend

This pleasing sight is the newly mended handle on my beloved handbag. The nice man at Merryfields did it (the link, unlike the handle, might be broken, it wouldn't work for me earlier)It took some coaxing to get him to believe that it was worth mending such a beat up old bag ("but I like it!"). Nonetheless, he's done a good job, I think.

To tell the truth, it was not I who did the beating up of the bag. I only bought it a couple of months ago, from the vintage bit at Motel. Not so much "making do", then...
It was cheap, though, and I really do like it- it makes me feel like a proper grown-up, possibly one living in the seventies. Chloe Sevignie in a period piece, perhaps?

The feverish joy of getting it (and my best ballet flats, newly resoled) back seems to have made me think I'm taking pictures for a leather goods catalogue:PS- Thank you for the lovely comments on the jumper!

(Yorkshire) Riviera jumper

Hot off the needles! Well, hot off the finishing table, anyway.... It actually came off the needles absolutely ages ago, but ended up getting stuck at finishing. Just in time for autumn, so I'm not complaining!It's Debbie Bliss' Riviera pattern, from her Alpaca Silk 2 book. I knit it out of the sadly discontinued Jaeger Luxury Tweed, hence the (Yorkshire) in the title, the Mediterranean riviera seeming singularly inappropriate as a namesake for a cabled tweed woolie...
I changed the collar from a great big scoopy thing to a little funnel one, which caused me a bit of grief (entirely caused by lack of planning!), and is where I got slowed down, but overall this was a smooth ride. The cables are quick to learn, and the knitting nips along at a suitable clip.
All very pleasing!PS- Ravelry ate my weekend! My invite came through on Saturday morning (beautiful timing!). I'm practicalpolly if anybody's interested...

Oddments

I was waiting a very long time for the bus on my way home this evening, and then got stuck in a world of traffic, so today's post is a bit miscellaneous...
Still, standing at a bus stop for ages meant that I finally noticed the view above. Not much to write home about at ground level, but lift your eyes and suddenly the narrowness and pointiness of the houses jumps out, and all the different pretty roofs.
I went on my way cheered by the surprises to be found above eye level- and cheered by some nice new bus knitting:This is going to be a fair isle slipover top, and it is going to keep my middle warm in the autumn. I'm using Italian Adriafil merino from the back of a shop again- here's hoping I have enough this time!

ETA- only 38 people ahead of me for Ravelry, eep eep!

Favourite shoes

These shoes make me happy whenever I wear them. I really love the shape of the toe: pointed but not too pointed. The heel hight is just right, and they make a pleasing click clack when I walk. Perfect!
I got them about three years ago (from Schuh I think, they're Irregular Choice), and don't wear them too often so they don't get worn out. I've had the heel tips replaced a couple of times (and they could do with it again), and they've lost a star, but they're doing ok. A good few years in them yet!
The leaves you see around them are not autumn leaves. They have fallen off the trees because of the very hot summer we are in the middle of. We have many more lovely summer days ahead of us, and will wear many summer dresses. Whatever the Met Office has to say.
See? The roses agree with me (even if the Michaelmas daisies don't), and are covered in buds!

Missability joy

I spent this evening at the Missability opening show, judging the amazing knitted walking stick cozy competition along with the other Bluestockings. It was organized by this lovely lady:Multimedia artist and musician Felicity Ford (I really really want to start that sentence with "mild mannered"- and Felix would so come up with the superhero goods by the end of the paragraph!)
There were some tough choices and some close calls, but we finally came up with the winners (to be revealed on the Missability site...)
Soundtrack to the night was the Missability radio show, and there was even cake- a perfect soiree!

A little bird told me...

...that sewing a pin onto the back of a button makes a broach.
This particular one came from a very small but very full button shop. They have buttons shaped like just about anything you can think of, and then some! Slice of cake? Of course, in which colour? Sewing shears? Why yes, large or small? Button joy!
Or in this case, with the addition of a broach back which Lara very kindly gave me for a different purpose entirely, broach joy!
I probably ought to have glued it, but I had thread not glue, and wanted to wear it now this minute. So I have to live with a slightly messy back. Oh well, nobody would ever have seen it if I hadn't just posted it...

Sensible stripes cardigan

Here I am in disguise as a grown-up!
This is so fresh off the needles that it still doesn't have any buttons (it might get some wooden toggles, given that the buttonholes I made might turn out not to be very big- but suggestions are very welcome!)It's a basic top down raglan, made using the trusty calculator. I knit it out of Blue Sky Alpacas
delicious organic cotton, in bone and nut. The colours aren't dyed at all, the cotton just grows that way! Very pleasing (and very, very soft)I shaped the waist a little bit (as you can see in the above picture), and I worked turned hems on the sleeves and the bottom instead of ribbing (as you can see in the below- slightly blurry- picture)I'm very pleased with it, the perfect goes-with-most-things stripy cotton cardie, which will solve all my summer evening cover-up dilemmas, and my in-between season quandaries. Hurrah!
I am very pleased, not least because I tried to make it last summer, but made the tactical error of going yarn shopping with my Mum. It turns out that if you buy yarn with your Mum, you end up with colours best suited to a small child (but chances are she'll pay, so it has its good side...). Anyway, the upshot was that last summer I made the perfect kindergarten stripy cotton cardie, which accounts for the grown-up-ness of this one.

Sort of my own handiwork

I selected these beads and strung them onto some elastic all by myself, does that count as making a necklace?
Modeled here with the gorgeous slipover top Flatmate Alice made for me last year- it gets a lot of wear, particularly in the inbetween seasons!
Here's a closeup:
You can really see the lovely burnished wood on the beads, and the tweedy-fluffy-angorayness of the jumper. Texture happiness!

Are these yours?

I nearly stepped on these on the pavement outside the Taylorian library in Oxford, so I popped them on a ledge. They were just lying there on the pavement, all shiny and unscratched and neatly folded:
I hope their owner comes back for them!

Picnic skirt

Today feels like summer is over before having really started up yet, so I thought it was a good time to post about this skirt.
I cut it out in September last year, sewed most of it, and abandoned it, finished except for the waistband and hem, until late this July. The sad fate of a summer project started at the end of the season!
I made it out of a tablecloth from a market stall, using this vintage pattern from a charity shop:It's view 4.
It's not the most flattering skirt I have ever made, but I think that's more than made up for by the jam jars adorning it- who needs a trim waist if they have jam!In that picture you can see the slight tulip shape on the side seams, caused by not having quite enough fabric, and laziness. I could have pieced in little godets, and done fancy plaid matching, but I decided it wasn't worth it on a skirt which is only going to get out to play a few times each year...
I also went for a handkerchief hem, on the same reasoning.
Here's a back view:
And finally- in it's natural habitat- the spread out on the park lawn! If you're going to make skirts out of picnic tablecloths, you ought to eat picnics in them!

Charts!

By popular demand, I've scanned the charts I used for the Wonder Woman jumper. They're huge, and upsetting my Flickr, so if you would like them please e-mail me. I'm not sure they'll be terribly useful, but I've posted a tutorial to go with them on Craftster, to explain a bit (it's really not a proper pattern- more like a report!).
Do let me know if anything is horribly unclear, or if you've any other questions.

Thank you again for all the lovely comments which are still coming in- they make me all warm and fuzzy inside. Many more and I truly will be able to fly, tee hee!

Goodies

I'm so excited by all the comments and links the Wonder Woman jumper has been getting! I'm working my way through replying to them all, but I'm a bit slow, so I haven't got to all of them yet... Loads of people have asked about the pattern, so I'll also be scanning the charts I used tomorrow, and posting those.
In the meantime, Flatmate Alice is back from Japan, hurrah! I made her the cake at the top to celebrate (it's supposed to be cherry blossoms..)
I'm glad I did, because she brought back me some gorgeous Japanese fabric: It's a medium weight cotton twill, with a lovely stretch to it. And it has little ladies with watering cans! and wheel-barrow/lawn-mower things! I see a skirt in my future...