Knitting Looms

So I have some new toys.  I've never been one much for yarn crafts.  My mother tried to teach me to crochet many years ago and it was a spectacular failure.  My rows kept getting shorter and tighter.  I finally gave up.  Now that I am getting back into crafting, I've been thinking about trying yarn crafts again.  A coworker was kind enough to give me two round knitting looms she had laying around after I saw them online and mentioned how I wanted to try it.  What is a knitting loom you ask?  The round ones look like this:

The green is an adult size if you're making a hat.  The red is for children.  They make smaller and larger sizes, but these were the two my coworker had, and I wouldn't turn down free.  I won't go into how to use the looms.  There are a million and one videos online about how to use them that do a better job than I ever could.  I recommend you check them out.  It is dead simple to do.  Unfortunately she didn't have the hook that comes with them so I had to MacGuyver one for myself.  The pic below shows the one I made next to a real one:

So I had some $0.99 mystery yarn from the Goodwill that I decided to mess around with and try out the looms.  Basic acrylic yarn (I think) of medium thickness.  I discovered two things: 1) It truly was as easy as it looked and 2) one strand of yarn of the medium thickness is not thick enough to make an effective hat.  They came out really floppy and the weave looked really open.  The one on the left is the adult size made with the green loom and the one on the right is the child size made with the red loom.

Using a kind gift of additional yarn from another coworker, I tried doubling up to two strands.  I had some yellow left so I mixed in a sage color.  I only made one in the child size to see how it came out.  This was definitely better.  The two strands together provided more stability and the weave was tighter with the extra bulk.

My mother also gave me a lot of yarns.  One in particular was a bulky purple yarn that looks only slightly narrower than a pencil if not pulled tight.  I decided to see how that one loomed up since its bulk would make good winter weight items.  Again I did a child size being unsure of whether I had enough yarn.  Of course now the remainder is too small to make anything else with.  No clue what to do with it.

One of my coworkers has agreed to take the purple hat home to test on one of her grandchildren for fit.  I haven't been keeping track of the rows except for the last one. The purple hat is 14 rows folded in half for the brim and 19 rows from the brim to the top.  We'll see if that is good or if I need to adjust.

Not having children of appropriate age in my family at the moment, all the hats except for the purple one are being donated to a domestic violence shelter in the local area.  As I experiment with different yarns and such, the finished products will go there if I don't have a recipient in mind.

Not Quite a Refashion #3 - cardigan to awesome cardigan

Unfortunately, due to my busy work schedule, I've been restricted to projects that are portable and can be done at my desk.  So while this isn't really a refashion, I am hoping to squeak it in because it did take an item I wasn't a huge fan of and made it something I might wear more often.

This cardigan started life as a plain red cardigan.  Actually, by a huge coincidence, I have a grey one exactly like it.  I bought it for the bold pop of color, but the big redness of it turned out to be a bit too color-blockish for me.  So it languished in my closet as I wore other brightly colored items that weren't, well, so RED.

You may have noticed my introduction to embroidery.  This gave me the idea to embroider something on the cardigan as a way to pass the time at work.  A coworker suggested doing the design all in white so it would pop against the bright red.  After some looking around for an appropriate design, I found a flower design at knitting-and.com here except I turned it upside down on my cardigan.  I also copied the big flower over again for the smaller side design.  The heavier knit meant I went through embroidery floss much faster than on the thin linen fabric I was using for the kitchen proverbs.

The whole front, I apologize for the poor contrast with the background.  For some reason I put it on my dining room table to take this picture.

Just for comparison, I also have closeup pictures of each side so you can see the design better, and I even have a picture of me wearing the cardigan to show you what it looks like on.  So picture blitz ahoy!

I like it much better this way and I've already gotten several compliments.  Though these were from coworkers who know I've been crafting up a storm at my desk through these long hours.  More projects from the storm will be posted later as I catch up getting pictures taken.

Nifty Gifty

My brother is one of those male animals who is impossible to buy for.  I think he gets it from our dad.  The biggest hits are random obscure kinds of classic things.  Last year for christmas I bought him a box (empty) that had the Union Jack painted on each side.  He loved it.

His birthday is coming up and I'm cash strapped so I immediately started thinking what I could make him.  I was considering a wallet, and indeed had bought the necessary fabric paints to get the design I wanted, when this embroidery thing I've been doing at work prompted inspiration.  I'll monogram some handkerchiefs for him!  The embroidery can't be harder than the little girl pictures I've been doing, and this definitely falls under random classic item he'd probably like.

So, $4.99 pack of 6 handkerchiefs from Target (thinnest handkerchiefs I have ever been able to see right through) and $0.99 satiny rayon embroidery thread (5 little bins for black in the basic cotton floss ALL EMPTY) later I was on my way.  My mom chose the font Old London from dafont.com.  I didn't need to download it since I needed to sketch it out on paper, but I made sure it was a free font anyway.  Sketching the font on the handkerchief was a challenge because even though the kerchief was ridiculously thin, at 100% cotton it bled like crazy.  So my water soluble and 48 hour disappearing markers were useless.  I couldn't get a crisp enough line to follow for the actual embroidery.  I finally had to turn to my iron-on transfer pen.  With that one you draw the design backward on paper (no bleeding!) the put it ink down on the fabric and iron.  A permanent line, but thin enough the stitches would cover it up.

Finally I could get started, but it was so later in the day after all the experimenting I decided to wait until the next day.  Sunday I got cracking early in case I messed up and had to go buy more handkerchiefs.  It was terrible.  That floss was a nightmare.  It frayed like mad.  I only used two threads to keep the embroidery lighter on the fabric, but they would not blend well like cotton floss does.  The thread twisted around themselves so they wouldn't lay flat and made little loops that would not lay down.  I had to unpick stitches and try to untwist the thread and it was crazy.  Finally there was victory (for me) and all three were done.  Three because I had messed up the iron-on transfer and done it to the back of two of the handkerchiefs.  Oops.

Below are the front and back of one of the monograms for you to see.  They all came out pretty much the same so that was good.

So that is how I spent my weekend after buying ridiculous amounts of yarn for my mom who crochets.  She is using 100% cotton yarn called Sugar and Cream right now, which happened to be on sale here where I live.  So of course I volunteered to go buy lots of it for her.  I have two plastic shopping bags stuffed full of yarn in my apartment right now.  She may have yarn forever.

Mending #3 and #4

So my Make and Mend challenge is swimming right along since I had that mending to do for my father and a coworker asked me to fix something for him.  When you can sew and mend it sends out a subliminal signal that others can sense.  That and I was embroidering at work.  Whichever explanation you prefer.

Mending #3 was a sweater for my father.  The lesson with this one is don't rip out your tags.  Just don't do it.  Why?  It leaves a hole.  Of course.  Unfortunately, my mom didn't have matching thread so I volunteered to bring the sweater home with me since I was positive I had matching thread.  Nope.  Luckily when I swung by JoAnn's they had my fave thread: Gütermann for 40% off.  So I picked up some grey and invisible thread, just in case.

Below are the inside view with all my stitching and the outside view.  You can tell on the outside it was mended by the distortions in the knit lines, but the thing had a hole.  Not just a tear, an actual hole.  Couldn't just grab a pair of scissors to cut the tag out, then even if there was a mistake there would be a tear that is easy to close back up.  Nope.

Mending #4 is a Coworker Hoodie.  Apparently the kangaroo pouch on the front of his hoodie had come away on one side.  Luckily I had brought my father sweater to work for mending (though I didn't actually do it until I was home) - yay for long work hours - and the grey thread was also a perfect match for the hoodie.  In fact it matched so well I had to go slower than I would normally to make sure I wasn't sewing back over my previous stitches.  They were really hard to see.  Plus three layers of a thick knit with the pocket edge folded under.  It went pretty quickly for all that and the finished result is below.  It is actually a straight seam, it looks bent because I didn't take the picture until he put it on so he is holding it out for me.  I also included a smaller inset of what the original stitching would have looked like courtesy of the other end of the pocket.

Yay for mending.  Only one more project for the month.  Plus I need to get my third refashion in for the Refashion Nation.  So much to do, so little time.  Once my job lets up I'll have much more time to be creative.  For now I am stuck with smaller projects I can bring to work since this is where I am spending the bulk of my time.

Embroidery Complete

Well, my first foray into the world of embroidery was exciting and pretty successful if I don't say so myself.  I finished the second two pictures for the gift for my grandmother.  That is four pictures in five days.  Not too shabby.

The third picture is below.  I have also included a closeup of the hair because unlike the others, this girl's hair is colored in.  I used two strands of a medium brown and one of a golden-mustard brown for a highlighted effect.  It was the suggestion of one of my coworkers, and I think it came out really pretty.

The fourth and last picture was the simplest in my opinion, which was nice because I was getting a little tired of embroidery by this point.

So there you have it.  Four retro-vibe pictures embroidered with three strands of floss throughout.  The embroidery needle that came with the kit was the size of the tapestry needles I saw in JoAnn's, so not sure about that.  Oh well.

Embroidery? Certainly!

SO my job has been keeping at work late this week.  I knew this was coming so I looked about for some sort of projects I could do at my desk that wasn't too much of a production.  Digging around on my craft shelves I found an embroidery kit I had been given for christmas.  I hadn't ever tried embroidery before, so I thought I'd give it a shot.  Plus, the box looked portable.

It wasn't until I got it to work that I opened it and realized the patterns it came with I (a) didn't like and (b) didn't have an iron to transfer to the humongous piece of fabric anyway.  So what does a crafty girl do when faced with this dilemma?  Apply some internet to this problem.  I found some cute vintage-looking kitchen proverb patterns here that were perfect.  The guide is not good at all, so I went with whatever colors I wanted and used 3 strands all around.  For those who don't embroider, like me 3 days ago, embroidery floss is actually 6 strands woven together.  You pull it apart to whatever thickness you want based on the number of strands you use.

The colors that came with the kit were also a bit bland, but luckily a coworker had a bunch of floss in her desk (I swear she got that thing from wherever Mary Poppins got her carpet bag).  After getting the first one done, I decided to do 4 pictures total on the fabric and then mail it to my grandmother as a christmas present.  That gives me plenty of time to finish.  Pictures 1 and 2 are done, below:

Mending #2 and idea of #3

So it must be something about guys and the backs of their shirts.  Boyfriend has a polo shirt where he mysteriously tore a hole horizontally through the white stripe near the collar in the back.  The tag is fabric and sewn in totally in a large rectangle, so it wasn't that.  So mending #2 was just using white thread and sewing the raw edges back together.  Luckily the polo is a knit so I didn't have to deal with any unraveling.

Mending #3 is a similar situation on a grey sweater belonging to my father.  My mom didn't have thread that matched, so I took it thinking I did.  Well, yeah no, so when I was out at JoAnn's I picked some up.  Turned out Gütermann thread was 40% off.  So I picked up some invisible thread too.  Bonus.  I'll get to that when I have a chance.  Work is crazy right now.