A stitch of whimsy

🧶🧶🧶 My favourite tip: Weave in the first end in advance

FAQs:

❓Why do I fray the end first?

👉 To taper it, so it blends better.

❓What if I want to frog?

👉 You can unravel down to the very last stitch, then pull out the end and start anew.

❓Does this work with all yarns?

👉 It works best with non-superwash wool, but I use it with most yarn qualities.

1. Wool. Treat it like it has the delicate constitution of a Victorian lady and the conviction that baths are evil of a 17th century noble. (If I get in WATER my PORES will OPEN and I will CATCH ILL AND DIE.)

2. Cotton; easygoing. Will shrink a bit if washed and dried hot.

3. Silk; people think it’s like wool and has the constitution of a fashionably dying of consumption Victorian lady, but actually it’s quite tough. Can be washed in an ordinary washer, and either tumbled dry without heat or hung to dry.

It’s undeniably cotton season in this part of Europe, and while cotton is a wonderfully versatile natural fibre, it does have one frustrating disadvantage: the ends tend to poke out after weaving in.

So, I take extra care with cotton ends. As with joining skeins, I cut each ply at a different length while weaving in.

I also check the yarn ends after the first wash and trim or sew in any ends sticking out…

How do you handle your yarn ends in cotton? I’d love to hear if you have any tips!

My final for the first year of my fashion and textile course :] fossils cardigan featuring living fossils like coelacanth and lots of dinosaur bones. Big love letter to palaeontology and natural history. Got super into my knitting machine but I wasn’t very adept with it yet so I sort of crocheted around the edges of my pieces and sewed them all together, and crocheted some edges/ribbing. The buttons are handmade from polymer clay. Used some second hand gold yarn I found in a charity shop and a whole bunch of mixed variegated wool together. My most ambitious project yet I completely just did not speak to people for that final month I was working on this 😭

Some close ups:

And my watercolour paintings this piece was based on:

Invisible stranding, also known as ladderback jacquard 🧶 🧶 🧶

This is a technique for catching floats which is completely invisible from the right side. To work it, cast on an extra stitch behind the work and purl it on every round with the colour not in use. This creates an extra layer on the wrong side, like a spider’s web. When the pattern is completed, the extra stitch is eliminated by knitting it together with its corresponding front stitch.

This method is ideal for sweater yokes with isolated motifs and very long floats.

I once tried it on socks, but I wouldn’t recommend it for that purpose: the extra layer on the inside tends to catch when pulling them on…

You can practice this technique with square 28. The Invisible One of the Learn-to-Knit Blanket. Find the pattern in the book Learn to Knit in 50 Squares.

Here’s a simple bobble:

👉 kyok, turn, p3, turn, CDD.

But… I prefer to knit backwards instead of turning and purling. So this is how I do it 😉🙌🧶

Started stitching the Milky Way in. Slowly making progress on it as I am hiding the travelling thread so the back will look nice.

Progress on the constellation quilt has come along quite a lot now. Finished the binding on the quilt over the weekend. I prefer to machine stitch the binding to the front then hand stitch the back side. It gives such a nice finish to the quilt. Took the time to measure it also and it ended up being 72" by 72" (183cm by 183cm).

Behold the stars of the constellations of the northern sky! I love how this quilt has turned out. It was a lot of fun to work on and the effect is so cool in person. Overall I would estimate it took about 90-100 hours to complete. Give or take 10 hours if you want to count the time I spent custom dying the fabric.

I made sure to get a nice photo of it in daylight. For once I also remembered to get a quilt label on it. The back really shows the difference in readability of the quilting on the ice dyed fabric compared to the solid front. Thank you everyone that has followed this. I am glad you all found joy in it.