Uncertainty and tedium are two things that I don’t do well with.  So, after a quick trip to a lunchtime vegetarian Chinese buffet (!) and $5 at Hobby Lobby later, we returned to our hotel room with a small bag of embroidery floss and proceeded to work on these:

As long as you can procure a safety pin and a pair of scissors, friendship bracelets are a surprisingly great travel craft: portable, relatively fast, airplane-friendly, instantly wearable upon completion, and can give you an excuse to channel-surf and become surprisingly absorbed in shows like Unlikely Animal Friends I and II and a quite self-explanatory Cocaine Sub Hunt.  For example.

Of course, I’m as guilty of “look!  It’s snow on things!” photography as everybody else, so I’ll include this photo of my neighbor’s car.  She’s been clearing the snow off the top of it as it falls, but I’m pretty sure that she’s not planning on using it until our town’s winter on-street parking ban is over, or spring hits — whichever comes first.

I’ve also been using our snow days for further slow progress on my Lady Grey coat.  I finished pad-stitching the lapels — the layer of stitching that makes your lapels flop open at the right place — which was not nearly as arduous of a process as people make it sound.  I mean, I knit things.  Making a couple hundred stitches in something is not the last word in tediousness for me.  I used a drumstick under the roll line while I worked (thanks, Guitar Hero World Tour!) and used my dinky-but-bright IKEA sewing light to the utmost.  Turns out that using black thread on dark gray interfacing is maybe not the best idea for the eyes, but hey, the lapel flops nicely.

I think I spoke last time about how reluctant I’d been to cut into this big hunk of nice wool, but it is really fantastic stuff.  I’d assumed that it would be bulky and awkward to handle, but it presses instantly and obediently, stays put when I want it to stay put, and sews like a dream.

I’m going to baste the sleeves in next and assess the fit.  So far, the shell is unexpectedly loose, even over a sweater — you can see how big it around the shoulders on the dressform.  But I’ve still got to add shoulder pads, a lining, and (of course) the arms, and those might change the fit dramatically.  If it really is the kind of baggy that a belt won’t fix, I can undo the topstitching and take in some seams, but I don’t think it’s that bad.  We’ll see.

I also made bound buttonholes per the tutorial, which were really fun and surprisingly easy.  I think that finding some black silk organza made the process much easier — it presses readily and crisply. Here’s the practice buttonhole (which I sewed with red thread):

One important thing that I’ve learned from my modest sewing experience is that buttonholes are forever.  Once you cut them, you can’t take them back, and I don’t have any leftover wool to re-cut the front in case of a mess-up.  And there are a lot of easy errors to make, like:

• Interfacing and sewing them on the wrong side of the fabric
• Placing them slightly too close to the fabric edge and having them eaten by the seam allowance
• Installing them in a wobbly line
• Not having them parallel to each other
• Sewing them slightly too far from the edge of the fabric, and thus having a flap of excess jacket sticking up and getting caught on things

… and then there’s the very real threat of doing the actual buttonholes badly.  But I really like the bound method linked above — it looks pretty professional, and you can adjust and realign your work as you go (so, for example, I could fix the slight wonkiness on the one edge of my practice buttonhole).  Still, you’d better believe that I cut out the buttonholes on my jacket carefully.

… but can you spot the one thing I forgot to check for?

That’s right: I put the buttonholes on the wrong side of the front piece.  This is not a fatal error, and I’ve got a plan for how to sew on the buttons to compensate.  But still!  Constant vigilance!

I made myself feel better about the mistake by answering my husband’s request for a picture of our cats with a top hat and Pince-nez Photoshopped onto them. The simple things, you know.

This year, we were aided in that goal by Sunday night’s snowstorm.  We’ve had virtually no snow so far this winter, which has (perhaps unfairly) only increased my impression of New England winters not being nearly as harsh as they’re talked up to be.  So I was definitely not upset to have an extra blizzard-given craft day appended to my holiday weekend, and spent much of it watching my neighbors dig out their driveways and walkways.  This being not nearly as cold of a place as Canada or the upper Midwest, though, the plowed roads were already thawing out under the sun the next day. Why, when I was a child, it snowed uphill!  Both ways!

My big project of the moment is the Lady Grey coat, which I’ve had my eye on for some time.  Then a good portion of the crafty internet made one as part of a sew-along.  I’m not typically one who requires a lot of hand-holding, and I’d already purchased some tailoring books and materials in anticipation of forging out on my own, but I figured it’d be an opportune time to tackle a fairly larger project.  I’ve had a few yards of nice-quality — really nice quality — wool that my mom bought for me in Montreal kicking around for some time now, and it seemed like the LG coat would be a good reason to hack boldly into it.

After a muslin or two, of course.

Here are my fitting notes, to add to the wealth of groupthinky knowledge that is the internet.  (Please note that these none-too-flattering photos were taken a month or so ago, immediately following a trip to the gym.  Also, I’ve left on a sweatshirt and a t-shirt, because even though I’m not going to be wearing a coat with below-the-elbow sleeves in the depth of winter, it is likely that I’ll be wearing it over a couple of layers.)

After this muslin, I ended up taking a huge chunk out of the floppy lapel, lowering the armholes a good 3/4″ on both the body and the sleeves, tapering the peplum slightly on most of the pieces, and enlarging the sleeve cap slightly.  After some tinkering, I left the sleeves alone, because I wasn’t doing much good, and I can always take them in later if I need to.  This particular muslin comes from an old bedsheet that I moved from Montreal for this express purpose: I love nothing better than being able to scribble directly on my draft garment with various colors of ballpoint pen.

Also, this is the part where I brag about cutting out the revised pattern.  One of my husband’s particular talents is the ability to fit things neatly into a given space: he’s incredibly useful when it comes to packing boxes, for example, and we’ve never had anything broken in any of our Pete-packed moves.  So, I gave him my steam-treated, pre-shrunk length of wool, a brief lesson on the meaning of pattern markings like “cut on fold,” and had him go to town.

In the end, he was able to fit all of the shell pieces on a 2 1/3-yard length of wool, when the pattern calls for more than 4.  Boo-yah.  Do not try this at home.

Next up: lots and lots of tailoring, and a cautionary tale about buttonhole-related overconfidence.

Useful links, other than the sew-along:

• Pre-shrinking wool at home
• A great tutorial on how to adjust and redraft a super-gaping lapel

When so many patterns have been made with countless different yarns, and when every yarn has what seems like equal numbers of lovers and haters, what is one to do? Especially when one is still learning and other than “cannot work with mohair,” doesn’t have much firsthand experience with fibers?

Heh, “cannot work with mohair” is something I learned for myself the hard way.  Fiber preferences and tolerances are entirely a matter of trial and error, and work in mysterious fashions.  I find alpaca incredibly soft and warm, except for some varieties, which turn sneakily prickly on my neck after half an hour.  I find most varieties of wool to be extremely scratchy, except when it’s winter and my skin is apparently too chilly to complain.  I find cotton soothing and soft, except I’m working on two projects with it now and it’s just killing my wrists.

That said, I picked up a copy of The Knitter’s Guide to Yarn from the library a few years ago and thought it was stellar — not only does it give you an exhaustive rundown of different types of fibers, but helps you understand and predict how they’ll behave in different garments, and when combined in different ways.  (Yeah, I should pick up a copy for myself.)  It also gave me necessary confidence in understanding yarn substitutions — for example, not only looking at the recommended gauge, needle size, and fiber content of a similar yarn, but also eyeballing the yards per gram.

So, both experience and vague understanding are my guides here.  Oh, and price.  Just to narrow the field, I shop a lot at Elann, Knitpicks, and a couple of vendors that sell Cascade 220 & Eco Wool, then comb through the reviews at Ravelry on whatever yarns have caught my eye.  (For example, I recently bought some Knitpicks Palette to make some mittens because it’s super-cheap and comes in a huge array of colors; the reviews tell me that it pills a lot, though, so I know that it wouldn’t be a good choice for a sweater or something less tightly knit.)

Ravelry is an incredible resource. In fact, it has SO much information that I’m still trying to figure out how to keep from being completely overwhelmed by it all.

I tend to use Ravelry more as a reference, and not something that I just comb through aimlessly (except when I’m bored).  For example, I had my eye on Vivian for a couple of months before I decided to make it, and in the intervening time I read through the reviews and looked at the photos that people were posting of their own sweaters.  I figured that, since I don’t have a hard time following charts, I’d be fine with the instructions given that I spent some time sifting through them first; I also used photos and comments to guide my decision about what size to make (and to size up the arms, which were apparently very tight.  Conversely, I’ve been wanting to make the Petal Halter — even have the yarn for it and everything — but the reviews have totally scared me away.  If the seaming and sizing and just about everything about it are going to make me want to rip out my hair, it’s not worth it.

I do also tend to browse through the most popular patterns in certain categories when I’m in the mood, too.  That’s how I found Owls, which is so stinkin’ cute I can’t stand it, and Vinterblomster Mittens (ditto).  And seeing projects on Real People is invaluable; I mean, you can never guarantee how your project will turn out, but noticing that something looks like an ill-fitting sack on everyone with my body type is a pretty good thing to know.

A few other miscellaneous helps:

• The tutorials at TECHknitter, which are clear and often quite ingenious.  (I just started using her technique for joining items knit in the round, and wondered where it’s been all my life.)
• Math.  These days, I end up resizing just about everything, and it’s oh-so-liberating knowing how to make my gauge work for my project.  What’s more, it’s really not hard: if I know the number of stitches I’m getting per inch, and look at the number of stitches that make up the circumference of the sweater, it’s pretty easy to figure out how large a certain size will actually turn out to be.

In sum, I guess my thesis is: the internet is awesome because it means that you can grok the knowledge of thousands, and not have to figure everything out for yourself.

Time: Several weeks, mostly drying.

Cost: $33.

I cleaned out my sweater box a little while ago and purged a small number of sweaters that I’d knit but never got around to wearing.  The one that gave me the most conflict was a very warm, very hard-wearing cardigan made from some Peace Fleece, because — though its thickness and resilience made it perfect for wearing in winter around the house — I kind of hated it, for two reasons.  One is that it had been the survivor of a moth scare, and still smelled strongly of mothballs, and the other was the color. It looks all innocent and creamy in the photo below, but in real life possessed this slight yellowish-greenish tinge, like the color of a sweater that had been sitting in a closet since the 1970s or which had been exposed to years and years of secondhand cigarette smoke.  There are fewer colors more singularly unflattering on me, or guaranteed to make me look more jaundiced and ill.  To top it off, it had speckles of mint green and violet sprinkled through it, which just… no.

I really had issues with it.

A week or so passed, as I idly contemplated the Peace Fleece yarn itself — it’s scratchy as hell, and not something I can ever wear against the skin, but it’s very warm and wears like iron.  It’d be the perfect thing for a dedicated sweater to wear around the house, because I’d never be able to damage it.  And — lightbulb moment — I already had more than enough on hand; I just needed to reclaim it, and change the color.  What did I have to lose, really?

Using some of the sweater recycling tutorials available on the web, I spent a few mornings undoing seams and unravelling yarn in a mohair-infused cloud of mothball smell.  (I also brushed off the couch a few times in the process.)  The photo above is only half of the resulting yarn ramen, or yarn vomit…

… which was then treated to a long, relaxing soak in lukewarm water and a generous dose of Eucalan, then hung up to dry.  And the drying took a while.  The cheap tension rod holding up our bedroom curtains was suspended across our short bathroom hallway, and — thanks to its firmly resting on top of the door moldings — kept the yarn out of sight (and above our heads) as it aired out, post-soak.

After some research, I decided that acid dyes would be the surest bet for transforming the yellowish yarn into something more palatable.  There’s tons of information out there on dyes; I mostly stuck to the advice in this Knitty article.  While the safety cautions about acid dyes are scary, the conclusion I reached was that if I followed safety procedures, the biggest threat would be accidentally dyeing my kitchen purple.

I bought the dyes with some yarn from Knit Picks, but spent a couple of unfruitful afternoons raiding a number of Montreal-area thrift stores for a dyeing vessel.  Montreal goes against all conventional thrift-store wisdom — I was not able to find a single used crockpot, or cheap stainless dutch oven (no matter how beaten up) to use for my project.  I eventually ended up buying a big stainless stockpot from Canadian Tire, justifying the price by noting that I’ll probably be able to use it for some other future project.

I used my digital scale to divide the yarn into three equal pot-filling lots, and divided the dye out into equal portions (above).  The one place in this entire process where guesswork played a significant factor was estimating the amount of dye necessary to cover the white and candy-colored flecks in the yarn.  I knew I’d be fine with any shade of dark-ish purple or blue, so I erred on the side of using too much dye.  Despite my caution, you can see how dye gets everywhere when you look at the wet paper towels above.  (Happily, the floors and countertops of our rented apartment are really stunningly crappy, so I didn’t care about getting them stained.)

Simmering away on the stove, with a bit of vinegar for good measure.  I took all of the recommended cautions and avoided stirring it around more than necessary, but the color distribution on all of the batches ended up being very even — I didn’t end up with three different dye lots, which was my big fear.  However, because I was so dye-happy, the dye was never entirely exhausted; I had to drain each lot after about 35 minutes.

Pre-soaking, pre-dyed wool on the right, and post-dye, post-post-dye soak wool on the left.  Big difference, huh?  Despite the dye left in the pot at the end of the process, almost none rinsed out in the post-dye soak; it’s really colorfast.  Imagine all of the newly purple yarn spending another week or so hanging in the hallway, and…

The finished product.  I love how the re-dyed yarn turned out.  The color is a very dark purple or blackberry, with only a little bit of variation.  (The gauge swatch above was knit with the one tiny skein that I tied up too tightly, so it has a few white specks on it.)  It’s still the warm, virtually indestructible yarn I bought years ago, but now in a color that I adore.  And it no longer smells like mothballs at all.