Wednesday 31 January 2018

Two easy things to finish January

Having made some things that were challenging this month (the coat, my plaid popover shirt) I finished off January with a couple of very easy things: a tote bag and a very easy knit garment.

Tote bag and navy knit gilet
The tote bag is in the oddest fabric that I purchased way back at the very start of my sewing adventures -- long before I got into garment sewing. It's a weirdly splotchy dyed, sequinned brown corduroy. I don't even know why I bought a metre of weirdly splotchy sequinned brown corduroy, and 2011!me did not keep a note of what it was for, so this weekend it became a tote bag. This is an old favourite pattern, the Ava Rose by ArtsyCraftsyBabe.

The navy knit waistcoat/gilet/bodywarmer/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is an actual clone of a garment I made in 2016 and wore/washed so much that the fabric completely disintegrated in the first wash of 2018. I definitely got my 30 wears in -- and more! At any rate, my new one is made to the same pattern (New Look 6251) in the same type of fabric -- a quilted knit, although this time the quilting has a geometric rather than floral pattern -- and it's the same colour. In fact, the only differences are that (a) I did a tiny fit adjustment (shoulder width); (b) I used emerald green rather than blue and white bias tape to finish the armhole, which you can just see peeking out above; (c) I used a plain ponte rather than the quilted knit for the inner collar to reduce the bulk of those seams and (d) I bought a longer zip. The instructions say to use a 61cm (24") zip, but this was definitely too short and in the original garment I had a gap at the hem and at the top of the collar. A 66cm (26") zip is exactly right.


My plan for February is a mix of my February Magazine Challenge (very probably a wacky top again), woven shirts in some long-hoarded fabrics, and some other random stuff around the edges to keep things interesting.

Giant striped wrap of doom -- now well over halfway done :D
One more update: knitting! I took a pretty long break from knitting most of last year. I wasn't feeling very enthusiastic about it after several very lackluster sweater outcomes and realizing I owned more knit scarves than any one woman in a mainly temperate climate can possibly wear. The only thing I had on my needles is a very pick-up-and-put-down sort of project: the Purl Soho Seed Stitch Wrap, which is an enormous stripey thing in, as the name suggests, never-ending seed stitch. It was last seen on my blog in April 2017 at only 3.5 stripes long. Between April and December I worked on the scarf occasionally, adding another 2.5 stripes in total. This month I felt much more keen on knitting overall, and I've chugged my way through a further 2.5 stripes, for a total of 8.5 (out of a planned 13). I've found it's perfect knitting for in front of the TV, because it requires virtually none of my attention.

2 comments:

  1. I have some very similar brown sequinned corduroy, not splotchy though and I have 2m. Courtesy of my mother in law. I have no idea what to do with it. Love the gilet.

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    1. Sequinned cord: baffling sewers everywhere :D

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