Category Archives: thrift

Fix it Friday: chair gets cozied up

This weeks fixing is not a garment. That’s ok, right? I bought this chair years ago, and it became my first re-upholstering project as I covered the kind of dingy yellow cotton with a luscious silk. I thought (and still think) that the dark wood looked lovely with the saturated royal blue, but our apartment kind of looks like 1001 nights camping out with vintage/modern Scandinavian things right now, and I’m working on making it more nordic. Also, the fabric was starting to tear. No worries, the silk will be repurposed as bias binding!

Also, taking pictures in the winter is hard with the lack of daylight in the hours I’m at home doing crafty things. We decided (well, I decided, but John took the pictures (thanks!), so – “we”) to put the chair in the spotlight and take some interrogation style pictures. You have to make your own entertainment sometimes!

I saw this chair on pinterest a while ago, and I thought pairing knits with things you sit on seemed like a fantastic idea. A randomly gifted scarf came to the rescue, and now the chair is all cozied up.

The beauty of a small project like this, is that I can change out the seat fabric whenever I want. All I need is a half yard of fabric and a little time! I might not want to keep it like this forever, but for right now, I think it’s cute.

another marie-skirt

Finally, the other Marie skirt. I made the first one two years ago, refashioned from another skirt. This past summer, I made my second one, also refashioned from another skirt.

While I find it satisfying and sometimes exhilarating to create something new out of a pre-existing garment, it has a tendency to also be frustrating and a lot more difficult than I imagine when I set out. Maybe because of my impatience since the garment is practically half-finished already, but all of my re-fashions have a tendency to be full of botched techniques and lots of fudging!

I did try something fun with this skirt, which was to use a stable woven fabric in place of interfacing – I used a scrap of plain simple weave cotton. After following sewing blogs that focuses on vintage patterns and techniques (Gertie’s new blog for better sewing and sewaholic especially), I’ve been very inspired to try some on my own! This technique is supposed to provide some stability, without affecting the movement and look of the fabric like fusible interfacing does. Plus, I’m a sucker for using things I already have on hand!

The patterned fabric I used for the waistband facing was partly just for fun, and partly because I didn’t have enough of the skirt fabric left over. Actually, what you can’t really tell in the pictures is that I had to piece together the outside waistband in several places to make a waistband at all! This is where the botching of the skirt began, by the way. I then decided to match up the seamlines on the waistband with the pleats on the skirt, but that proved to be a bit of a hassle with the less than accurate piecing together of the waistband. Also – how easy is it to sew five layers of fabric together? Hmm… yes, a little hard. That’s how many layers I had at the intersection of skirt-pleat and waistband-seam.

Regardless of the mishaps I had while sewing, and subsequent corrections I’ve had to make (did the waistband stretch because it has no real interfacing? Did I measure incorrectly?), this is a skirt I’ve gotten a lot of use out of. For proof, I present to you the outfits I made around the “another Marie-skirt” in the month of September alone, during my Self-Stitched-September- stint:

Click to see larger

I find it a little funny that I only seem to wear black, white, or grey with this skirt, but it does showcase the rich red-violet color of the skirt. So, clearly I now have two new goals: 1. wear this skirt with some colored tops, and 2. Find me a skirt to cut up for another (another) Marie-skirt. They will rule my closet!

(trainstation-photos by the boy, pattern from Burdastyle)

a sweater, two hats, and a pattern of sorts

The first sweater I successfully frogged, or recycled for it’s yarn, was a charcoal wool/cotton blend Eddie Bauer specimen:

Even after knitting an entire new sweater for the boy, there was still a whole lot of yarn left. It was like an endless supply! Alongside the seamless sweater, there now exists an almost finished scarf, a baby-hat, a pair of socks, and,two adult-sized hats from this one original sweater.

The first of the hats I made, was the Butterfly beret by Rachel Iufer (ravelry link here). My Eddie Bauer yarn was thinner than what the pattern called for, so I ended up adding some repeats, both in width and length, to get the right size. The butterfly stitch is very clever, and it was an enjoyable and fairly easy knit. This is a gift for a friend, so hopefully she’ll be equally as happy with the hat as I am!

And now for something kind of exciting. I knitted a second hat, and this one I concocted the pattern for all by myself. This isn’t terribly unusual or noteworthy – a lot of my projects involve making things up as I go, and re-doing until I satisfied. What is exciting is that after knitting this self-composed hat twice, I’ve decided to write out the directions and publish it as a free pattern! I hope to have it finalized within a couple of days, so keep an eye out for:

the Reversible biking hat!

(ETA: The pattern is now available in this blogpost!)

thrifted skirt remake

I thrifted this skirt a while ago. I never really wore it, as it felt too long, hitting at an unflattering point 3 or 4 inches under the knee. I figured it’d be better if I shortened it, so I did, and it now hit just above the knees. But it felt too juvenile all of a sudden. Finally, after a lot of time spent not being worn, I found a way to bring the skirt back to life (and I’ve already worn it lots of times after finishing it!). I see now that the base color of the skirt matches my own skin-tone too well, and I think this is another reason I didn’t wear it much – it just blended in with my legs. The fix was a wide strip of contrasting fabric that seems to ground the skirt, defining a stopping point and providing the visual anchor that it was lacking.

Oh, sweet thrifted skirt, welcome back in my closet.

the pebble vest

There is a new baby nephew in the family, so of course I need to gift him some wool! Yes, I realize that this is the completely wrong season to be giving growing babies wool garments… I have no eye for baby-sizes, so half of the time this looks alternately too big or too small anyways. It was a quick and lovely knit however, so I figure that if not this particular baby nephew, someone will get some joy and use out of this vest.

The pattern is Pebble, the manly baby vest, by the Thrifty Knitter. As with most of my projects, I wanted to start immediately, with a complete disregard to recommended yarn-types and needle-sizes. This particular yarn came from a thrifted sweater that I frogged, and holding the yarn double, I came pretty close to the gauge in the pattern recipe.

This is a pretty popular pattern; it has 827 projects on Ravelry, and a favorite blogger of mine, Amanda of SouleMama, is on her third vest in about a year! I think my favorite part of this little project was the garter stitch. For being the dreaded beginner-knitter stitch, it is surprisingly squishy and yummy! I’ve kept my distance from the garter stitch for a long long time, but it’s just perfect for baby-projects.

I’ll be seeing the little family addition in person really soon, and I’m excited (a bit apprehensive too I have to admit!) to see if the vest fits. It seems easy enough to size the pattern up, so I think there might be more of these coming in the future!

seamless hybrid

Ever since seeing Jared’s Seamless Hybrid sweater over at brooklyntweed, I knew I had to make one myself. Luckily, the boy was on board, and so it started.

The pattern for this sweater is Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Seamless Hybrid, in “Knitting without tears”. Zimmerman is impressive enough as a knitter and patternmaker, but her books are also a really enjoyable read – being informative and funny, like she is having a conversation with a friend. The book is filled with no-nonsense and common-sense tips, like “your hobby should be enjoyable. If it isn’t, find a new one”, and “if how you prefer to do things seems to work better than what the pattern tells you, do it your way”. I like those kinds of messages!

This sweater started it’s life as another sweater. Back here I was taking it apart, and it looked like this:

… and this is how much yarn the sweater yielded. I guess it doesn’t look like all that much, but it’s since become a sweater, a pair of man-sized socks, a yard worth of scarf in progress, and seven balls of varying sizes left. The original sweater was from Eddie Bauer, in a cotton/wool blend.

The pattern, like Mr. Brooklyntweed noted, is more of a recipe or guide than anything. It pretty much tells you to figure out the gauge for the yarn and needles you want to use (say 5 stitches/inch), decide how big or wide you want the body of the sweater (say 32 inches), and calculate how many stitches you need to cast on (5 x 32 = 160 stitches). The sleeves are a certain percentage of the amount of body stitches, and you just knit these three tubes until they reach the armpit, then join them together. The yoke is certainly the hardest part, and like many knitters have noted, the instructions are a little vague here. I found Jared’s post very helpful, not only for his description of knitting the yoke, but also with the nice close-ups of his sweater.

The sleeves and body are joined together into one big tube at the armpit, and some stitches are left alone at the very underarm. I used bright orange yarn to hold the stitches while I was knitting the rest of the sweater. The boy requested that I sewed up the underarm stitches with the orange yarn – he liked the idea of a semi-hidden, unexpected flash of orange under the arm!

I thought the pattern was very easy to work with. I actually like the way it’s set up, so I can use any yarn and any sized needles to make the sweater. Often times I want to knit things without having the exact materials that the pattern calls for, and I end up changing and making up a lot of things, and I’m sure with a less successful end result. Also, being a lot of stockinette knitting in the round, it’s a pretty quick knit as far as sweaters go.

The finished sweater was a tad tighter than I had planned, but for a first attempt at an actual garment (as opposed to mittens and socks and such), I am very very pleased. Plus, I see this as the test-round of many sweaters to come!

slouchy hat

One of the purposes of fall is to wear hats. Soft, warm, textured hats that makes your cheeks feel even rosier. And if you make the hat yourself, and the yarn is lovely and delicate, and the color is perfect, and the leafy lace pattern is the most enjoyable pattern you’ve knit in a long time, well – that’s a fall hat.

The yarn came from a sweater I took apart last winter. It really was a thin yarn, so I ended up knitting with it double, so the hat wouldn’t end up too thin or fall apart if you looked at it the wrong way. The lace pattern is from last winters Vogue knitting magazine, originally on a cardigan.

To use the pattern on the hat, I first figured out about how many stitches I needed for the circumference of the hat (I think about 150 – found out by trial and error, knitting the ribbing). Then, knowing how many stitches the repeat of the lace pattern was (10 stitches), I got 15 repeats of the pattern, and exactly 150 stitches. I might have increased or decreased after the ribbing was done – I don’t remember. But! It’s not hard to apply repeat patterns from other types of garments to a hat. The best thing is that the yarn-weight doesn’t matter; you’ve already figured out how many stitches you need to get the right size hat, and so the number of repeats will just be what it is. Decreasing towards the crown was the hardest part – especially with a lace pattern to consider. I made it all up as I went, but it was the only time I wished I had instructions to refer to.

Not quite fall yet in this picture – I finished it during the summer, before sending it off to Berlin.

Knitting this, it was lovely to feel something else than stockinette under my fingers, just yummy textured softness. There is more left of this yarn, so don’t be surprised to see something similar to the hat in the future! This particular one is already at its new home in Berlin, where fall has begun, and the hat is in use. Just like it was meant to.

http://indigorchid.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/yarnfest/