What I Made: March 2021

it's time for another episode of what i made a series with a terrible title because i can't name things to save my life but at least it's descriptive today i'm going to be talking about all the things that i sewed and knitted in the month of march there's no crochet this month mainly because i everything i want to crochet this year are like really large projects afghans and i just haven't settled on the vast quantities of yarn that i will need for those projects but hopefully i'll make a decision in april and have something to share about crochet what i'm going to get into today are finished projects works in progress what i'm hoping to start next and then a little bit of natural dyeing because i did another avocado experiment in march so let's get into it i'm going to start with probably the thing i am most proud of myself for actually making this past month i started and i finished it in about 10 days which is great and it's not knitting it's actually my one sewing project from this month i made another pair of aeronite pants this is a pattern by so liberated i made one version of it last year in like a dark brown color i'm actually wearing them today i'm not going to stand up and show them to you though um and i i had a horrible experience with messing up while i was making that pair of pants and i wanted to come back and do it again i wanted a red pair and i just wanted to do it better so i did um and i'm happy to say that i did everything by myself and while i made a mistake i was able to fix it by myself and the end result are much much better than my first pair of pants it's kind of nice to do the same pattern again after like six months and see how much i have improved at sewing mainly i can sort of sew in a straight line now and i couldn't before anyway um so this is actually the slim hack version of this pattern my mother modified the pattern pieces and gave them to me i still don't know anything about how to how to work with patterns so my mother is my crutch thank you mom um and i made this pair out of the really popular like medium weight linen from fabricstore.com and i'm really happy with this fabric choice it felt very stiff at first but it's been through the wash a couple of times now um and ironed and stuff and it feels much softer and drapier but still kind of has that nice crisp feel to it so i'm very happy i will definitely use uh linen from that place again in the future this is the first time that i ever sewed with linen and it was really nice to work with so pair of pants yay just in time for a warmer weather i will be wearing these like for half the week every week [Laughter] now we can move on to the knitting um i'll just quickly show that i did finish my gem gloves this is a free pattern from pearl soho links to everything i'm talking about will be down below in the description if you want to know more about them so last time i talked about these i just had to do the fingers on the second glove and it was taking me weeks and weeks and weeks to get around to it so i finished it and i went back and i changed the thumb a little bit on the first glove and so they're done and they fit but the thumb still doesn't fit properly it just it keeps sliding off i don't know i think that there isn't enough negative ease in this and plus the yarn i used it's it's more slippery it's got some silk or bombix or something in it and i feel like it's just slowly creeping off of my hands so whatever i have a pair of gloves i've proved that i can do it and now that i understand this pattern better i can modify it in the future for how however i want to do it so that's the gem gloves i'm very happy i actually finished a pair of gloves because i've never fully conquered fingers before it's really not that difficult to knit them especially like in my case i just magic looped them rather than dealing with dpns and that was a lot less finicky to deal with next up is the sweater that i'm currently wearing i was working on this last month and it is now finished this is the stripes sweater by andrea mowry and i love this i think the color scheme came out fantastic um the charcoal and brown colors are the alpaca supreme yarn from john urban textiles i think it's in the color anthracite and bronze the grayish color is also from john arben it is their cocktails range and the color white russian and then this red i got some red mohair and then a different red color i just mixed and matched it there's some leftovers i had in my stash i think the this red is berroco and then this mohair and some of the matching um fingering weight yarn is from santa scarn i don't remember the exact colors though anyway scraps it's a good sweater to use up um little bits of yarn in so yeah i'm very very happy with how this came out blocking was so important um this alpaca yarn with a lot of silk in it it just it looked kind of messy when i had knit it and then once i soaked it and it was properly wet blocked and dried it just everything kind of cinched up and got neat and tidy and it looks great i was so worried that it was going to be too loose that it would grow and instead i think it shrunk a little bit with blocking and it fits pretty much perfectly the one thing that i would change if i could go back and do this again um is i think i accidentally knit the yolk a little bit too deep i should have taken out like one stripe and i think that this was just a mistake because i thought that i had to knit one more row to get the right length and i never re-measured it and it's like half an inch one inch too deep or deeper than what the pattern calls for so for whatever reason so it doesn't mean that the um the underarm that's a little bit lower that i would necessarily like especially with so many stitches cast on in the underarm um but i'm not complaining it does fit it's very comfortable it's very light feeling but pretty warm so i won't be able to wear it too much before i have to pack it away for the summer but what can what can i do um the one irritating thing about doing this is that i had it completely done it was blocked and like i said it kind of shrunk and i put it on and realized the arms were too short so i had to i ripped out the the cuffs and i knit two more stripes and then did the cuff again and now it's perfect i had to just re-block the ends of the sleeves and it came out great but it's annoying when you think you're 100 done with a project and then you have to go fix that one thing it took me like one evening to do but whatever so yeah i am super happy with this sweater i have enough leftovers of all the main colors except for the red colors that i could probably do a second one if i just got another color maybe to like replace the red with something else i have an idea it might be a gift for somebody we'll see because i could knit this sweater over and over and over again it's really great and then the last finished object i have to show you guys today is this thing um let me see if i can actually put this on over this sweater okay now you can see it a little bit better now um this is my talervo cardigan this is one of the patterns that i said last time i wanted to do and i made the whole thing in like i don't know two three weeks it's a fast knit though um it's done in pretty pretty thick yarn like air and weight yarn and on big needles so even though it's cabled it has this really um like undulating pattern done with like staggered twists um that was super easy to do and really fast to do once i figured out how to do it without a cable needle that's it's so much faster to do cables when you're not using a cable needle um so yeah this just flew off off the needles for me and i loved making it so televote is a pattern by sorry nordland this is from um a past issue of pom-pom quarterly the theme of that one was terrain and i love that issue there are multiple things from from that magazine i really want to make this is the second thing i've made from it and i used the like recommended yarn it's de rero natura gilead in the color aster which is actually one of the colors used in the magazine as well i was a little bit worried about how it would look on me like after i bought the yarn i was like is this too pale is this too cool toned is it gonna make me look sick when i wear it but i think it's actually quite nice well we'll see how it looks in the winter when i'm super super pale i guess but yeah i'm very happy with it and i'm saying that it's done but actually i still need to sew on the buttons i was gonna do that last night while i was watching a movie and i just didn't but i'm calling it done because it is completely blocked and i've actually worn it out and about multiple times so it is a perfectly functional cardigan and i love it i do think it's one that i need to wear buttoned up though to keep it from like slowly falling off my shoulders i feel like it's kind of narrow shouldered or because it's got that v-neck shaping it doesn't i don't know i don't know um whatever next cardigan i make will maybe not have a v-neck shape because i'm always trying to pull my cardigan shut like this and they're usually not shaped for that but whatever so yeah as you can probably tell i am super happy about this project and i loved knitting on it i love this yarn um i'm not going to get any more of the yarn until i've worn this cardigan a little bit i want to see how it wears like what's the wear and tear on this yarn look like it's um a semi woolen spun so it has some of the um light airy qualities of a woolen spun yarn while also um having some of the sturdiness and the twist of a plied yarn of a wursted spun yarn so it feels very um dense isn't quite the word but it you just hold the yarn it's so light but it doesn't feel fragile which is what i've experienced with some like 100 percent one spun yarns so light and airy but super easy to pull apart which can be a bit scary when you're knitting with it so i would love to work with this yarn in the future especially if it doesn't fall apart like is it just me or do a lot of people not really talk about how long garments last like how sturdy the yarn is how it wears um i see a lot of beautiful things that people have knitted and crocheted and what i really want to know is what does that thing look like two years in the future when you've worn it a couple hundred times or whatever like does it does it actually last because if you're gonna make something that's so beautiful that takes so many materials so much time so much money is it worth it do you actually get to wear it or is it just gonna turn into a mess because i like i've made some things that have pilled so badly like pilled and felted after a couple of wears and they're just gross and there's not much you can do to save it but whatever i'm just rambling now um but yeah if this if this sweater or this cardigan i should say um wears quite well i will try to get more of this yarn i have another sweater one of thea coleman's newest patterns upper west side i think is what it's called that's done with this yarn and it's so beautiful i want to make it so badly all right moving on to works in progress i have three things to show you that i am actively working on uh the first one is the beginning of my librarian pull over this is a pattern by skeindeer knits and it has this um diamond pattern on it it looks like it's done with cables but it's actually using kind of twisted stitches and knit two togethers and ssks to create these slanting stitches it's really really fun and super easy to knit this is another project that's going to happen really fast i think this much is about two days worth of knitting guys but once again it's done in a really thick yarn and on big needles so for this i'm using this beautiful yarn this is a lovely like deep olivey green color um this is knit picks twill a worsted slash aaron weight yarn in the color fiddlehead and i bought this specifically because it was the right weight and a green color that i really enjoyed i'm a little bit nervous about how it's going to work out with this project because it is it's a very high twist um a super wash yarn and i i'm just a little bit worried that the really fantastic stitch definition is going to highlight the wonkiness of my stitches i don't know if you can see that or not but basically whenever i'm doing these like double knitted stitches to create the twists um my knit two together stitches look very odd and my ssks look much smoother so i feel like the the lines are going well you can really see that diamond pattern but if you look close the stitches are just kind of jogging a little bit and i don't know if that's my technique or if it's just the slipperiness of the yarn because super washed yarn it just it's a little bit more slippery slightly it's not as fuzzy necessarily i guess or at least this particular super wash yarn so i don't know it's going to be really fun and this is the first time i've been working on a sweater that's meant to fit pretty tightly so i'm hoping that i got the size right it's knit from the bottom up and then i need to when i'm when i'm done getting it up to the the armpit area i need to knit the sleeves from the cuff up and then attach them it's supposed to have a method of attaching the sleeves that kind of looks like a set in sleeve rather than like a raglan decrease or whatever and i'm really excited about that to see how it's going to fit together i don't completely understand the construction of the sweater even though i've done uh bottom up constructions where you attach the sleeves like that's that's how the tolerable cardigan was done and it's the second time i've done something like that but it was more like a bottom-up raglan which i understand versus this method so i'm excited for it and i'm really happy with my color choice if nothing else i'm enjoying the color this next work in progress is a completely random cast on i had no intentions of making this until i pulled out this yarn from stash and was like i was going to use this for something but i changed my mind what do i want to do with it so i'm doing this this is the beginnings of an azimuth tank top it's a pattern by julia wilkins i think it's another pattern from a pom-pom quarterly this is from the last summer's issue i forget what the theme of that issue was but it's got a lot of tank tops and vests and stuff in it so this is brioche which is why i picked it if you look at it it's got this very stretchy rib effect to it and that is the the brioche stitch but in this case it's brioche single color rather than one color on one side and the other color on on the other side so i picked this because i had this blue yarn already caked up for a project i decided ultimately i didn't want to make um and i thought this is a very summery color like if i'm gonna wear this it needs to be summer i need to have a tan so what can i make that hopefully has brioche that would be good for summer that being said i have no idea this is going to work out um i'm knitting it more tightly because i wasn't happy with the looseness of the fabric when i was trying to get gauge for the pattern so i went down a couple needle sizes did a different swatch did some math and i'm using i think size four's stitch count to try to get the size two measurements and because brioche is so stretchy and because it's gonna grow when it's blocked i don't actually know if it will be the right size i suspect it's gonna be too big and i may i may not have quite enough yarn because i only have two skeins of this blue yarn and there are these eyelet rows that are done in just a contrasting color and i'm using just some leftover bits and bobs for that but most of it's gonna be in the blue so i plan on knitting the body until i run out of the first skein and then doing some math based on on that to see if i might have enough to do the cropped version because this pattern comes in a cropped version and a longer one and i may just have to do the cropped one if it's not the right size or fit for me it can go in the gift pile really this is just a fun knit because it's my plain knitting i've worked a lot on this while listening to things in work meetings and i don't have to think about it my hands just do the motion and i think it's worth having projects on hand that are just for the the mindless knitting i don't necessarily care so much about the finished project i care about the the process and having my hands busy and and being able to do something that's soothing and monotonous is is very nice so we'll see what happens with this you may never see it again if i rip it out or you may see it again briefly before i get rid of it i don't know and the last thing that i have started but have very little to show you is the handsome chris pullover this is the heavily cabled sweater that's famous from the movie knives out chris evans character ransom wears it in a couple of scenes and it basically took the internet by storm everybody loves the sweater and i decided i wanted to attempt it so i bought yarn for it and this is knit picks simply wool i think yes simply wool in the color wordsworth which is kind of this light grayish brown color i think this particular sweater looks amazing in a really like a white or a cream color it really makes it pop but i'm making this for myself and i don't wear white especially in the winter so i had to go with a slightly darker neutral and i think this will work so i have started this in the sense that i have done a swatch for it this is not blocked yet um i knit this while re-watching the movie in fact and then realized i made a mistake i missed the twisted stitch columns on either side of the diamond pattern anyway i need to do another swatch and then wet block them because i think that this one which i used um 3.75 millimeter needles to do this and i think i need to go down to a three and a half millimeter needle to get it quite dense enough my my diamond cable pattern is a little bit bigger than the pattern indicates that it should be in the in the gauge section so yeah i'll make one more swatch and read read the charts correctly this time and see what i think um and talking about swatching i recently learned about how to encode the size of your needle in your swatch and this is brilliant this is helping me out so much um basically anushka from the crimson stitchery which is a knitting crochet podcast here on youtube she did a series on how to swatch recently and in i think the first video in that series she talks about how to use yarn overs and purl stitches to encode the millimeter size of your needles in your swatch and it's it's brilliant i wish that i had learned about this before because it's so incredibly handy i have swatches from previous projects where i didn't correctly note my needle size and so when i go back and like i want to make this pattern again i want to do it in the same needle size but i don't remember what it was and i would know if i had put it into the swatch so you can kind of see at the very bottom there so that is three yarn overs for three millimeters and then three purl stitches four three quarter millimeter measurements so anyway if you want to know more about this i would just say go watch the crimson stitchery's videos on swatching which have been very helpful for me and given me a bit of a kick in the butt to properly swatch for projects so well i say that and i'm never going to do swatches in the round guys i do all of my swatches knit flat but that's because my gauge depends so much on like the circumference of what i'm knitting the size of what i'm knitting and not necessarily whether i'm knitting in the round or knitting flat so that's a conversation for another day if anybody's interested in that so yeah i'm saying i'm starting this because i've officially started swatching and maybe next time i'll have a bit to show you but this is this is going to be a long-term project i'm not planning on blitzing through it in a month i mean i could if i wanted to probably but that would be a bit excessive it's it's a lot of cabling so we'll see how that goes that is it for my current works in progress and hopefully next month i will have more progress to share with you on those now i want to quickly talk about my one natural dyeing experiment in march and then we'll get into what i plan on working next so in march i revisited avocados when you die with avocados you are extracting dye from the pits and the skins not the green fleshy part and you can get some really interesting pink salmony mauve colors as well as some kind of more orangey tones from it so this is my second time working with avocado the first time i just did pits and it was really fun but i at the time didn't feel like cleaning all the skins but this time i saved a bunch of of pits and skins and i decided to set them up in different dives so that i could compare the color because you get slightly different colors between the pits and the skins you can mix them together if you want to but whatever um so do i have these in the right yeah i have these in the right order um the ones in on this side these are the avocado pits and they are more pinkish and then these over here are the skins they're a bit more orangey a bit more brown they looked like they really had a lot of orange in them when they were first dried but they seem to have mellowed out a little bit since then to a browner color so the lighter skeins in both colors are just like 20 30 minutes in the die pot and the darker versions are ones that went in for a second dip so you got more more depth of color more saturation there so really fun doing these and i like seeing um how different the colors are i'm not usually a fan of pinks but i've come to really appreciate anything that isn't like bubble gum barbie pink i hate like true pink i hate neon pinks but the colors you get from avocado pits are much more muted they're more complex and um more like mauve and sometimes almost more like a terra cotta or rosy colors and i really like the way that they look so these are just the straight colors just dip in and out of the dye pot and then i did some modifiers on some other skeins i was also experimenting with techniques like dip dyeing and trying to speckle so i'll show you those next four techniques i did one skein that i dip dyed so in this method you just you have this really long skate and you slowly lower it into the die pot so you go from the darkest color at the bottom because it's in the pot for the longest to the lightest color at the top because it's in the pot for the least amount of time so this is the dip dyed skein um i also i think i did a second round on the tip to get the the darkest color a little bit darker and then i briefly dipped that end into some iron after bath to try to get a little bit more of a purpley tinge to it which i was very successful in getting i thought i had gone too far and then it dried and i'm very happy with the color in it now now when it's scanned up it looks very similar to this other one if you look at this one it's a little bit more erratic um this is the speckled one so i put the skein of yarn into the avocado pit die pot and then i took it out and i just dabbed iron water on it to try to get these patches of more like purpley colors i didn't know what i was doing like it takes some time for the iron to really work into it spreads as well so i was trying to do speckling and instead i got splotchiness it still looks pretty cool though and in this version probably because of the concentration of dye and just how it was doing the iron water the darker patches are a little bit more gray than purple whereas on this one it definitely got some purpley hues out of it i think that has to do with the concentration of the avocado color um when you then apply iron on top of it so it came out really neat looking but if i were to do it again i would have to like be a little bit more precise with small drops of the iron water so those are the technique ones the other thing that i did was trying some different after baths so i first started out by actually adding modifiers into the dye pots like adding iron water directly into the dye pot and letting everything like simmer in there for a while but now i'm coming around to the idea of doing after baths because you can kind of control it a bit better and you don't have to split your dye pot into multiple pots on a stove or whatever so i am mostly experimenting with iron and changing the ph so these two skeins have been modified with vinegar to make it more acidic and then washing soda to make it more basic and the vinegar just really paled out the color and then the washing soda brought out more of the pinkish reddish tone so it's actually a little bit darker in color but not by a lot from just the the plain avocado so the the vinegar one gave me an aha moment though because my other one was trying to see gradations of iron water and i basically got no differences in between my three so i was doing one jar with a small amount of iron water then one with a medium amount and then with a large amount and they are pretty much identical and in fact the one that had the most iron water actually is kind of reverting i think it's this one it's kind of reverting to that paler pinkier undertone instead of being quite as dark and saturated as the small and medium ones it's very very slight differences i'm not sure that you can actually see any differences on camera but i was wondering why is this why is it that the iron concentration just didn't seem to have any effect i was trying to be very very light-handed so there should have been some differences but i think the problem may be that i'm using iron water which is a mixture of water vinegar and a rusty substance i've been using steel wool and it's the vinegar that might be the problem that's used to you know make it acidic and to help you know break down the iron um but it also changes the ph so i noticed this when i did the the vinegar after bath and then saw some of that same undertone in this higher concentration of of iron water so that may have been affecting all of my iron modifier experiments i'm going to get my hands on some ferrous powder to skip over having the vinegar solution just to see if it actually makes a difference or not but that is it for my avocado experiments it was quite fun i didn't get the exact depth of color that i was hoping for because i just didn't make a concentrated enough dye solution but despite that i managed to get visible results of all of my techniques so i'm happy about that i need to find something to do with all these little mini skeins though because i've got so many mini skeins dyed with food scraps and stuff so yeah and lastly projects that i want to start next i have too many things in my project queue i need to do some smaller projects that take less time so i wanted to do some socks i have the curly wurly and wafer crunch sock patterns from the crimson stitchery these are like really lacy summer socks and i really want to do them so i'm going to dive into my stash and see if i have a sock yarn that'll be like enough quantity to make these socks and get some little things done in april perhaps um and then i can't resist i have big projects as well the really big knitting project that i desperately want to make is this cardigan i've been obsessed with it looks like this i don't know if you can see it necessarily but there's this really beautiful pattern on the sleeves oh it's so beautiful this is the bindweed cardigan the pattern is by xenia naidion i think um and it's from making stories issue five which just came out a couple weeks ago i think i've been waiting for this to come out so i could buy it specifically for this cardigan pattern i love it for some reason i'm just obsessed with it so yeah and in fact i kind of have the right yarn for it it is made with a combination of a fingering weight yarn held double with some mohair silk lace yarn which is something i really like to do i've actually knit my balloon cardigan which is the same kind of combination and i love wearing that thing it's so light and soft and squishy and beautiful so i actually have this gray yarn this is knit picks twill fingering in the color carbon i think oh graphite heather and then nitpicks aloft in the color carbon this is the the mohair silk lace weight yarn so i think i have three skeins each of these and i probably need to get one or two more skeins of each of these for it but that means i have enough i could get started on it if i really wanted to also i need to order some stuff like bare yarn for for natural dyeing from nitpicks so another yarn order is probably in my future we'll say we'll see though um because i really want to make this but i think i should hold off on making more like super winter weather stuff until i've done my socks i don't know i don't know i'm trying to justify doing all the things all at once and i i don't have time and then the last thing that i want to make is another sewing project for some reason i've really latched on to the idea of doing some sort of thick plaid winter skirt i really only wear skirts in the winter so i'm usually looking to make ones that are very warm rather than light flowy drapey skirts so i knew i wanted to do it in some sort of plaid and while i was at joann's recently with my mother i found this fabric and i really like the look of it it's this i think i think this is called houndstooth and it's pretty much what i was looking for i wanted something that was kind of gray and bluish or navy and what wasn't black but wasn't super light either so this was perfect i got five yards of it it's this really thick cotton flannel and now i'm second guessing about whether it can really be a decent skirt or not but whatever i got the fabric and i picked out a pattern for it which i don't know where it is i have no idea where it is oops um i rated my mother's pattern stash and of course i picked the one that my mother has made like three or four versions of the skirt before we have we have very similar taste sometimes so i have the pattern ready to go i have the fabric ready to go and we'll see when i want to do this like i said it is a winter skirt and i if i make it now i wouldn't be wearing it probably anytime soon um but i'm pretty excited about doing another skirt pattern and maybe doing like some of the finishing by hand i think i would really enjoy more hand sewing i'm more comfortable using a sewing machine now but in the stuff i've done in the past the parts that i really enjoyed and found just really soothing and calming were the bits where i was sewing things on by hand so i needed i need to do more of that we'll see if i do that with this pattern it's not intended to be hand sewn but we'll see i think that's pretty much it unless i'm missing something it's been a very productive month for me like i've done so much reading multiple audio books lots of sewing lots of knitting this is probably not a sustainable pace but anyway um with that i think i will wrap wrap this one up let me know if any of these looked cool to you what are you currently making leave me some comments down below and i'll be back next month with another installment [Music] bye you

Channel: Kalanadi

Views: 588

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Isu_Wxu6jKk

Length: 36min 17sec (2177 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021