Knit One, Purl A Dozen...

It started, as so many of these things do, with a costume.

i dont evven knoww wwhat youre talking about thats not my pail 

The costume in question - Eridan Ampora from Homestuck - was fairly simple compared to many of my projects and I'm thoroughly pleased with how he turned out. Even though I had to make a floor length purple velvet cloak, the most time consuming part of the costume was the scarf - especially since I had more or less never knitted before. It was thirteen alternating 10cm sections of plain knit in two colours, and - sometimes only getting an hour or two of knitting in each week due to university obligations - took me around three months.

The pink, yellow and orange at the back are mine - shipped all the way to Japan at Christmas

My mother is a knitter - socks are her particular favourite, after felted slippers - and she'd been trying to get me into it for a while. I honestly wasn't all that interested! I am firmly in favour of stockings - the longer, finer, and tighter fitting the better, and thanks to my oddly shaped feet, punishing shoe preferences and general clumsyness I wear through them extremely quickly. Producing a pair of socks I would actually want to wear would take an obscene amount of time and skill, and then I would ruin them in the space of a day or two.

 Interesting, accessible patterns for anything else were hard to find. Anyone who's seen my sewing will know that I also find it very hard to stick to patterns! It was a toss up between a lot of old lady frumpiness (Knitted doilies! Egg cosies!) or faux-trendy 'crafter chic' which is all rather useless (Apple and banana cosies!). I hadn't learnt how to purl yet, and wasn't at all sure I could actually cast on on my own.

But probably because I had been knitting this scarf for so very long, my older brother got me this for my birthday;

I still haven't taken the obi off this book,
and neither have I taken the time to figure out what people call an obi outside of Japan

I have to admit I was a little bit horrified - what if it was full of socks, egg cosies and knitted place mats? - but this is actually a very sweet book with a very interesting range of patterns. There is a whole range of things, all presented to look very appealing, achievable, and inter-spaced with handy information and the odd titbit. One sock pattern even comes with a wine list. There is an emphasis on knitting for fun, so many of the scarf patterns seem to contain the instruction 'repeat pattern until you have used all of yarn A' and gauges etcetera are approximate. But there is also an excellent variety of patterns, rather than shapes (cables, ribs, chevrons, waves, brioche...) and it gets surprisingly technical at times. This is the perfect antidote to a flaw I've found in 'crafter chic', where many of the patterns just turn out to be stocking stitch in an unusual material or quirky shape.

The siren-like appeal of lace Habu wraps aside, I decided to set my sights on something achievable to begin with

The finished product, beautifully modelled by Alfred

I used Brocket's washbag pattern with a slightly larger needle size (It didn't make sense to me to buy a pair of 3.75mm needles when my other projects - and the wool - requested a pair of 4mm, and it seemed to work fine) and Cygnet Silcaress DK in Dove, with stripes of same in Thistle. I love purple and grey together! The ribbon is stash sourced, leftover from a last-minute Christmas party ensemble - coincidentally, that was also purple and grey (and copper) - purple ribbons and a fluffy, cable knit jumper. This seems appropriate somehow.

The first ten rows, modelled by Percival

I went shopping for all this yarn in one go, and nearly decided not to bother with the quirky little shop down a side street that I occasionally find the most delicious things in. I was glad I did! I stumbled across this beautiful Portuguese Rosarios 4 Bio Bamboo in the most stunning pink (Officially, it's colour 11) - and in the sale! I had a pattern from the book in mind - the buttercup and mustardseed fluted rib scarves - but both of which were done in chunkier wools with chunkier needles.

I started this morning. I'm knitting to the buttercup pattern (they're actually identical except for the end sizes, and the mustardseed is one repeat narrower) which will still give me rather a thin scarf in this gauge, but I'm quite happy with that. I think the pattern would be clearer if I was a little more consistent with the tension and didn't keep losing count when doing the repeats, but it's already starting to form the characteristic waves.

King Cole Bamboo Cotton for the sea glass chevron scarf,
modelled by Randolph

Even though it's a bit of a stretch for my abilities, the sea glass chevron scarf immediately caught my attention. It's a beautiful ribbed scarf with flowing chevron stripes. The yarn I liked only came in 100g balls - very annoying when you're supposed to have 10g of six different colours - so I went with a base and three contrasts instead of six. All four yarns are King Cole Bamboo Cotton - 50% bamboo, 50% cotton! I'm a great fan of bamboo, one of the most versatile plants on the planet (Except for hemp, possibly the most versatile) and the soft, smooth texture of this kind of yarn is perfect for a scarf for me. I'm terribly fussy about fluffy things around my neck. The base colour is going to be the rich purple 524, with accents of white 530, mauve 528 and bright pink 536.

I was also very keen to try out some blanket patterns. I'm likely to be spending another winter at my parents and the house - particularly my room - gets very, very cold due to some intriguing thermostat shenanigans. I love the fat plaited bread cable blanket, and although I'm a poor and uneducated knitter I am passable at crochet, and the art deco blanket looked lovely (With a colour scheme tweak, of course)! However I quickly realised how obscenely expensive yarn is and just how much I would need to make up a blanket of any reasonable size - I might just be able to afford to do one of the smaller patterns in cheap acrylic, which rather defeats the point. My solution to this problem, however, is something I'll tackle in another blog.

Alice's Crinoline

It was Tuesday evening, and I had known for four weeks that the coming Saturday was 'Alice Day' in Oxford. I had four weeks to mull over the idea of making a dress for the event and decide against it.

Then on Tuesday night it all went horribly wrong.

I've had about ten metres of blue polished cotton lurking around for a little while and had already settled on making a crinoline from it. I also have a lot - a LOT - of OTHER stash fabrics in the offing, not to mention trims etcetera. I also don't have a lot of money at the moment.

To cut a long story short, I've set myself an unlikely task - to make the 1861-1863 Crinoline Day Dress from Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 2, using only fabrics, trims etcetera I already own. I've set myself a strict budget for inevitable extras - thread, boning, the odd bit of lining or ribbon - of £30. I've also set myself a strict deadline for the first part, of Saturday, as sprawling project creep is my nemesis. I'm not crazy enough to think I can have an entire crinoline done in three days, so I've organised the project into three phases and laid out exactly what I plan to have done in each. Phase three is highly optional but somehow, strangely inevitable.

Phase One - to be completed by Saturday:

Elliptical Crinoline
Using the Laughing Moon pattern that is my best friend ever, some red and black striped fabric that I bought online and then didn't really like that much in person (It happens, more often than not), left over fabric tape and - more than likely - plastic tubing. The plastic tubing may swallow an unexpectedly large amount of my budget.

Petticoat
ONE petticoat, and it's not even allowed to be a fancy one! I haven't yet decided what fabric to use, but it may well be some sheeting I have lying around.

Crinoline Skirt
From the Arnold pattern, blue cotton with inserts at hem. I'm unsure of what fabric I'm going to use to make the inserts at the moment. Also unsure if I'm actually going to line it, or merely face the hem - the original silk fabric would have needed the structure, whereas I'm using upholstery weight cotton, which probably will not. I think I'm also going to leave out the pocket, which looks complicated, at least until Phase Two.

That's it! Not too bad, I think - the two skirts are one day projects each, I think (Although I say that now...) and I can usually run up a petticoat in a couple of hours. This will be worn with a corset and chemise I already own, a modern shirt and hat, and possibly a shawl. Not very historical but it will give me a sense of achievement.

Optional to Phase One otherwise Phase Two

Bloomers
Split legged drawers will make this dress masses more convenient, but they're not essential for first time wear as I dislike public toilets immensely and avoid using them at all costs even when not in hoops and petticoats. These will probably again be cotton sheeting, and may well end up being significantly re-trimmed in Phase Two if made in Phase One.

Phase Two - to be completed by a week Saturday

Chemise
The chemise I plan to use for Phase One is my Phantomhive Strip Tease chemise, and as such is sleeveless and short with a very fancy yoke. Really, I would prefer a full length chemise with sleeves. Probably loosely based on the Simplicity Civil War Undergarments pattern, I'm going to avoid getting bogged down in trims but a little whitework on the yoke may be inevitable at a later stage...

Pagoda Sleeved Bodice
Also from the Arnold pattern, in the blue cotton. I'm tempted to use some vintage white rayon velvet ribbons I picked up to do the pleated trim but I have a feeling I just don't have enough - only about six metres, whereas I have a sneaky feeling that when Arnold asks for 112" of trim for the bodice she means just the bodice. I also have some vintage silver Italian buttons I think would look great down the front.

Second Petticoat
What, you mean other people only wear one petticoat? This will also include the Trimming Of The First Petticoat.

Engageantes
Although I love the embroidered and drawn work engageantes in museum collections - as well as my own (I have a big of a thing for undersleeves) these are likely to be quite plain, at least for now.

This should, in theory, make up a full working outfit by the end of next week. Not bad for ten days work!

But of course, there is also;

Phase Three - indeterminate finish

Evening Bodice
Likely based on the evening crinoline the next page over in Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 2. In blue cotton with sleeves to match the inserts.

Corset
Every outfit needs a matching corset, right? Right? I'm actually very tempted to make this the ribbon corset I currently have many metres of blue ribbon with white hearts lying around for.

Extra embellishment
Of all of the above.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves - first things first, and that means the elliptical crinoline.