The return, and knitting owlette's knitted/crocheted wedding

Hello... I am still here... I have unfortunately been afflicted with a horrible disease which has stopped me from posting anything. You may have heard of it? Its called laziness...

Its been a very busy 7 months, with working full-time and planning a wedding, but that's no excuse. I will try and be better!

So yes, big thing happened, got married back in June. Of course my first thought (well, after "fuck,  I now need to plan a wedding") was that I needed a knitted bouquet. Other than Mr Owl, no one else was really sold on the idea (no flowers at the wedding? will they really stand up?), but I ignored them as usual.

I started playing around with patterns on Ravelry and dug out a book that I won on a WI raffle but had never looked at. Then, after seeing this (there was a lot of pinterest and googling going on), I decided I absolutely had to have lavender, and bought the book that the pattern was from.

As you can imagine, I ended up with a ton of rejects that I wanted to somehow use. I had a first crazy idea to do some sort of wall piece but the scale of that seemed a little too much. Mr Owl then suggested that I make mini bouquets to tie up on the aisle chairs as decorations. And that became the plan. I was excited. Of course at the point I had not realised the scale of that task. Each bouquet had to have at least 6 flowers otherwise it would look sad. We initially had decided to do 10 rows of chairs, so that's 20 bouquets. Which means 120 flowers plus foliage plus the actual bouquet plus the buttonholes.

I'm not going to describe how at some point I lost the will to live and cursed myself for my crazy ideas. Instead, I'll pretend it never happened and just share some pretty photos with you, taken by my lovely photographer Hannah.

If you are wondering about the flowers, we have daisies from this book, the lavender, campanula and leaves from this book, a generic flower pattern from this book and a carnation I found on Ravelry. There's also a dark purple flower that I honestly have forgotten where its from but probably from one of the first two books.

I used florist wire for the stem, which I anchored through the base of flower and then twisted in itself, essentially halving its length and doubling its width. I don't remember the size (width and length) but medium width and long length is a good guess. I found that the really fine wire was just too flimsy and the very thick wire was difficult to use.

I toyed with the idea of knitting an icord to cover the stem but quickly decided that it wasn't necessary and just used washi tape instead. But beware, when I ran out of washi tape I bought some florist tape and it was a nightmare to use as its not as sticky...

As I wanted a more wild-, natural-looking bouquet, I didn't stick the flowers in a styrofoam ball, like others have done before. I just tied the whole thing together with string and then covered it with a crochet lace ribbon.

The mini bouquets are basically the same but have some other random flowers and leaves in them too (from the two books). I ended up using 7 flowers in each but did fewer bouquets.

And finally, the lavender buttonhole was made in essentially the same way but I used much much shorter wire of course.

Some final thoughts. Crochet is definitely better for flowers than knitting. Especially for anyone making as many flowers, crochet is so much faster and produces a much tighter/stiffer flower. The only one that was worth doing as a knitted flower was the lavender.

If anyone reading this is thinking about it, my advice is do it, even if just for the bouquet. Yes, there was cursing, yes I had to go to the pub with my yarn to stay on schedule, but I now have a beautiful bouquet in my living room that will always remind me of my wedding day. Plus, all the bouquets disappeared from the chairs as soon as the ceremony was over, which made it worth the effort! 

Back to 'school' Lilou

You may, or may not, have noticed my absence in the past few months. I've been a terrible blogger. I actually made so many things just before the holidays, so it wasn't a hiatus from crafting, just from blogging about it. The problem, I've found, is taking decent photos of the finished objects, I kind of forget to do it, or there's never a good time, I have even written a few posts that I never published because I never took the photos.

Which brings us to today. I will apologise now for the terrible photos included in this post, but I really wanted to get back into blogging and I am home alone this weekend. I am not really photogenic as it is, and have a terrible tendency to blink or make weird facial expressions just as the camera goes, and having to take the photos myself certainly doesn't help. Especially because there's no one there to make me smile like a normal person. But fuck it, here we go.

I call this the "back to 'school' dress", even though technically I should have called it the "back to work" dress, but it doesn't really have the same ring to it, does it? Anyway, as some of you know, in 2014 I decided to take a career break and go back to school/university for a year, which was followed by months of freelancing (aka working in my pyjamas on my sofa). However, tomorrow I am starting a new job, in a real office, interacting with real people. Which is freaking me out! So to deal with it, I decided I needed a new dress.

This is the Lilou dress from Love at First Stitch, and I stole the idea from another blogger. I wouldn't have normally picked to make a plain, denim dress, but I thought it might be a fun blank canvas to wear with interesting tops, rather than just make another denim skirt. I even bought the exact same fabric, mainly because I wanted to make sure that it wouldn't be too thick to wear as a dress.

New skill alert: I lined the bodice of this dress, using the rabbit fabric that was leftover from my circle skirt. That turned out to be pretty straightforward (and a nicer finish I think than facings), although having to turn it inside out was a bit of a pain in the ass, potentially because of the thickness of the fabric.

I am fairly happy with it overall. The back is a little gapey, as usual with Tilly's patterns on me, so perhaps next time I will try and modify the bodice slightly to get a better fit. Also, there are a few lumps and bumps in the bodice where the lining and main fabric don't quite line up, but I don't think it is that obvious, and I'm sure that gets better with practice.

I am also sticking to the metal zip, which is significantly easier for me to install than any of the other zips, I have not idea why I find zips so hard!

The top underneath is also a new make by the way. I bought a ton of stuff during the Girl Charlee fabric sale, including this cute number. The pattern is from Gertie Sews Vintage Casual, modified to have slightly puffy sleeves.

Anyway, wish me luck! And I promise to write up at least some of my recent makes soon...

Luxury yarn for a luxury hat for my luxury hair

We've all been there. Bought that really expensive top or shoes (or yarn) and just left it in our closet, not wearing it out of fear that we will ruin it, that no occasion is worthy of it. 

This is what happened when I finally succumbed to the softness and shine of the Fyberspates Scrumptious yarn at the Ally Pally Knitting and Stitching show last year. Should this be a cowl, I wondered, or perhaps fingerless gloves? But is it wasted if I make gloves, which tend to felt and pile as you wear them? And so it sat in my drawer, unused and unloved for a full year.

But my year of making my own clothes has taught me to show them my love by wearing them rather than admiring them in my closet, and I decided that the time had finally come to make something out of this lovely yarn. And here it is.

The yarn is obscenely expensive (I think I paid £15 for one skein of 100g), but it is AMAZING! Definitely the most beautiful yarn I have ever worked with. Ok so it isn't very highly twisted, which made it hard to do all those k2tog and ssk that lace needs, but it is truly a joy to wear. The silk means that it is super super soft and not scratchy at all (something that I struggle with with 100% wool yarns unless they are merino), and also it has a beautiful shine that makes it look that extra bit special. And surely the silk will help stop my stupid hair from going frizzy?!

It helps, of course, that this was a really nice pattern to knit. The pattern is called Schwimmen, and I found it while looking on Ravelry for inspiration based on what other knitters had used this yarn for (which also convinced me that it was ok to use such a luxury yarn for a hat). It has that really good combination of being interesting to knit because of the lace, but at the same time not so complicated that you have to take copious notes and can't do anything else at the same time for fear of distraction. 

Close-up of the lace pattern

I did change it a little bit though. It calls for casting on 110 stitches, but that seemed like far too many so I decided to cast on 100 and then increase after the ribbing panel was done. I couldn't be bothered to calculate how to change the rib based on my number of stitches, so I just did a k1p1 rib instead. And I don't have 3.75mm needles (for the ribbing), so I used one 3.5mm and one 4mm - unorthodox, I know, but I figured it would probably average out somehow! 

The end result is also meant to be quite slouchy, but I was worried it might end up a bit too slouchy, if such a thing exists, so I started the decreases after round 25 of the second round of lace pattern. 

All in all, a huge success for my first fall accessory. Maybe one day I will I deserve something incredible extravagant and buy myself enough of this to make a cardigan or jumper. Maybe.

Of trees and owls: Henriette and Akita

I've been incredible lazy and slow at posting, apologies to anyone who actually follows the blog. I have been crafty, just not really had time to write about it, promise! Here's a bonus picture of Dr Jenner mid-lick, with a hint of the project below (if you are not interested in knitting, you can probably stop here).



Let's start with the Henriette cardi by Andi Satterlund. Remember I said I wanted to get some cotton yarn that behaves more like wool and was thinking of trying Blue Sky Alpacas? Well, I did, and I tell you, this yarn is awesome! Its soft and squishy like wool but also non-itchy and light like cotton. I managed to find some on sale from Mrs Moon so it wasn't horrendous, and it turned out that I bought a whole skein more than I needed (I think I bought four skeins but I only used three) so this wasn't as expensive as I thought it was going to be.

So, back to the cardi. Simply said, this was complicated. Andi does call it a challenging knit, to be fair to her, but I feel that perhaps it is written in a more complicated way than strictly necessary. I essentially had to take notes on what  I was supposed to do for every single row and have at least two if not three sheets of instructions in front of me at all times. I tried to knit some of it during a long drive to Cornwall to use the time for something useful, but the complex instructions along with me getting car sick (apparently knitting on the bus and the car have a different effect) meant that it was impossible.

I didn't deliberately make any modifications, but I completely misunderstood the instructions for the lace/cable trees in the bottom back of the cardi so I think I basically ended up with one giant tree in the middle and two bushes on each side. Oh well!

For anyone interested, the back has three consecutive sections of the lace/cable pattern and the instruction is to start the first and third at row 11 and the middle one at row 1. What I did was to stick to 11-20 for the ones on the side (the 'leafy' top of the tree) and 1-11 for the middle (hence the long bark). Whereas towards the end I realised that I was meant to just keep cycling through the pattern instead (eg the middle column would go from 1 to 20 and then back to 1). The instructions towards the end also got a bit confusing, where you are decreasing and thus loosing bits of your tree lace/cable, but I have to admit that I forgot what I did there. It definitely had an element of improvisation as I didn't understand the instruction.

At the moment the buttons I have on there are too small so it doesn't look great closed, and I am hoping that the look will improve once I replace them. It does, however, seem to be a little big on the shoulders (it sort of slides down), and I am not entirely sure how to fix this, perhaps picking up fewer stitches for the button band would help? It would also stop it from puckering, which it does at the moment when buttoned up. I think I would also make the sleeves longer if I made it again.

And as another bonus, I have a sewing project to share that I can't be bothered to write a separate post for (now that I am on the roll and all). This is the seamwork Akita top, which came for free with the first issue I subscribed to (although now the seamwork team has decided to let you pick whichever pattern you like every month, which would have been handy last month for me instead of paying for the Astoria). And yes, this top has owls, woo hoo! (or hoot hoot!)

I read lots of people commenting that this is an odd one as it is one giant piece sewn together on the sides, and to be honest, I am not sure it really works, at least not on my frame. It looks quite baggy at the top but then it is too tight around the hips, to the point where I had to make the side slits longer. I also have a sneaky suspicion that I cut it against the grain (still struggling a bit with this), which may explain, first why the owls are sideways, and also how it hangs. But, I have worn it once already and it is quite comfy so I'm not giving up on it.

I also decided to add a little label so that I can tell which is the front and which is the back, which for some weird reason is making me very happy.

Ok, that's it for now, hopefully I won't take ages to write again.