DesigKnit

Remember the skirt I was making a few weeks ago?

Well. I started the practice version, and got all the way through the waist finishing when I realized that the fit just wasn’t quite right. It needed some darts in the back. I pulled out the waistband and set about adding some darts for shaping. On the second or third try, I was beginning to remember just how difficult it can be to do final shaping and pinning on yourself. Working with sharp pins behind your own back while twisting to see what you’re doing in a mirror is not always the best way to get results.

I have often contemplated buying a dress form for just such a reason. Unfortunately, they are fairly expensive, and my body doesn’t fit the standard dressform shape anyway (even the adjustable ones leave something to be desired).

A long time ago I heard about people making their own dressforms out of duct tape. It came up again fairly recently in conversation somewhere, and when I got to this particular sticky spot with the skirt it came bubbling right back to the surface. We bought a couple of rolls of duct tape and some expanding foam, and started off on an adventure in 3D sculpting.

I have to say that Branden did most of the work on the dressform. Besides standing very still for an eternally long time to get completely cocooned in duct tape, I didn’t do much at all. Branden fashioned a quasi-skeleton out of cardboard, and then went to work filling the model with expanding foam. We figured that the whole project would take about a week.

A month or so later, it is finally done.

It turns out that expandable foam dries very quickly when it’s exposed to air, but not so quickly when it’s inside a duct tape dress form. We put the first two cans in one at a time, and left them to cure at least overnight. Then we noti can said that it only took 8 hours to cure, so we put the last 3 cans in about 8 hours apart. This turned out to be a mistake. Without the airflow, the foam took weeks to dry and harden into its final shape, and some of it is still slightly soft even now. Remedies included poking holes in the duct tape and other such measures, but did not greatly speed up the process.

Despite a few deformities acquired in the soft-foam stage, the dressform is a very good model of my body (for better or worse…not recommended for those who prefer their mental body image to reality). I have to say that it is a little odd having such an accurate replica of myself standing around in odd corners in the house, but it’s now hiding behind a chair in my office rather than standing eerily around waiting to dry, at least. Those stubborn darts took about 15 minutes to pin and to sew this weekend, and now the skirt is finished. I guess I’d better make more clothes, now that I have a custom dressform!

In other news, the embroidered sweater is off of the needles and blocked as of last night.

It still requires a zipper, which I am afraid will necessitate a field trip to the fabric store, as the zipper I bought last time doesn’t quite match.  Still, it is inching closer to done, and I do like the way the front rib details came out.

My spinning wheel has also been busy. I took those braids of roving, and sent them through the drum carder:

It seemed like a shame to blend such nice colors, but I want a mostly solid colorway with no dominant color stripes, so blended they must be.

I can’t say that I’m unhappy with the results, either. They’re not as eye-catching as the original braids, perhaps, but I do like the subtle color shifts, too.

Now that they’re blended, the olive also looks like it belongs.

I think I’m going to like this yarn.

The embroidered sweater is gliding smoothly toward the finish line (I’ll spare you a picture of its pale gray sameness). It would have been done by now, actually, had I not run out of yarn. I could have sworn I’d spun another small skein, but I can’t find it, so I must have wound it up at one point and not realized that I’d already knit it. I spun up a new skeinlet of about 250 yards yesterday, and now have a nice, medium-sized ball with which to finish off the sleeve and collar.

As usual, imminent finishing is causing me to scramble a bit to figure out the next thing for the needles. The mobius cowl is languishing in my commuting bag, so it may come out for a week or so to fill the gap and get some love.

I’ve also been short a spinning project for some time now. I finally got around to raiding my bin of shop seconds this past weekend, and came up with this:

That’s a pound and a half of mostly-Falkland in some mostly-related shades of green and teal. It’s destined to be a 3-ply yarn: one of teal, one of the bright green, and one of the olive green. (I think. I’m still a teensy bit on the fence about that olive in the mix. It will either muddy the waters or provide some grounding to the brighter jewel tones, and I can’t quite tell which yet. It may not make it to spinning, but only time will tell.)

The fiber is mostly semisolid, but there is enough variation that I might end up with long-repeat stripes like I did in the Blue-Eyes sweater. Sometimes I like that kind of striping, but it’s not really what I’m going for here. Also, I was a little concerned about evenly mixing the colors in the final yarn, especially since the teals are two different but related colorways. And so, out came the drum carder.

I broke the two teal braids up into foot-long segments, and ran them through the carder just once, alternating braids so that the batt is made up of layers of the two colorways. This should go a long way toward making the color more uniform, without losing the subtler variations in the hand dyed fiber. The bright greens will get the same treatment, and the olive probably will, too.

I’m spinning the batts as a very light laceweight single, but plan to three-ply them into a light fingering weight yarn in the end. This yarn won’t be ready in time to be the next knitting project, but it feels good to have something on the wheel again, after a month of it sitting idle! It’s also nice to be back into color, after quite a lot of gray. I do love the natural wools, but find that they are best alternated with something a little brighter, just to liven things up a bit.

Funny how something that takes months the first time can pull together in a week when things go right.

Just like that, I’m back to the same place I was last week, plus a cuff and a grafted-on sleeve. 20% fewer stitches helps, too, I suppose. It looks like the sweater will be just in time, too. It’s suddenly turned to fall around here. On Wednesday, it was in the upper 80’s and humid. Tonight, it’s going to get down to 40. Suddenly we need sweaters on outside, even during the day. Something about school being back in session makes it suddenly real that winter is on its way.

I do like fall, though this year I’m not looking forward to the darkness and the short days. It’s always so much easier to wake up bright and early when it is actually bright outside. One of the first things I noticed this week when my alarm started going off for my usual commuting train was that it’s still dark when we get up now. The upside, of course, is that I’ll get to see sunrise every morning from the train platform in a few weeks’ time. That’s always a nice way to start the day.

In the meantime, I’m picking up stitches and knitting that second sleeve just as fast as I can. With any luck, there will be a new sweater on the shelves before the air gets cold and the leaves start to fall. Must. knit. faster!

I think my knitting may be jealous of the time I’m spending with other crafts.

I’ve been working quietly away on the sleeve for the Embroidered Sweater, which has been growing very slowly due to small needles. I seem to have forgotten how to knit sweater sleeves lately: they haven’t gone smoothly the first time in the last few sweaters that I’ve knit.  This time, the trouble started when I picked up stitches and knit the sleevecap while my brain was still mushy from work. I simply forgot the sleevecap shaping.

No problem, I thought. I snip and graft all the time, and I’ll just do an afterthought sleevecap to add a little shape at the end. That was perfectly fine.

Then, I cast on the wrong number of stitches for the rest of the sleeve, despite having counted twice. (I always knit my sleeves in two parts, so that I can do a top-down, set-in sleeve and not have to carry around the sweater. I just graft them back together at the end.) Instead of 135 stitches, I cast on 85.

No big deal, I said. I’ll just decrease normally until I get to 85 stitches, and piece on the last 4 inches closer to the cuff.

Well, when I got to full sleeve length without reaching 85 stitches, I started to get concerned. The sleeve was looking awfully wide. I went back and looked at the sweater body, and the sleeve did match the sweater body. But it was still awfully wide. Like flying squirrel underarm wide.

Long story short, last night I ended up ripping back the entire sleeve and both sleevecaps and picking up stitches again. This time, I started out with 105 stitches, remembered the sleevecap shaping, and it appears that the new sleeves will be much closer to human proportions.

The bright side is that the new sleeve will have 20% fewer stitches in it, and (I think) the sleeve is now back to mindless/endless knitting stage, just in time for my fall commute to begin tomorrow. Has to count for something, right?