Happy Halloween!

I don't really do much for Halloween other than wait for trick-or-treaters. We usually get close to a hundred kids or so. I don't think we have that many kids in the neighborhood, so I'm not sure where they come from. I decided to at least dress up a little more festively this year. This was my ensemble for greeting the kids.

On the needles

I'm one sleeve away from finishing Goodale. The yarn is Brown Sheep Serendipity Tweed. I had a lot of yarn so I decided to make longer sleeves. Longer sleeves are better anyway for a fall sweater. I love the front lapel pockets on this pattern, but I don't like the wide opening. On me, sweaters like that tend to sit even more open than shown on a model. I added increases to the front of the sweater. It still flares open when worn, but it's a much narrower opening.

I'm also working on the Geodesic cardigan. The yarn is Araucania Ranco solid. I knit all of the back of this cardi during the various airplane and train rides on the Japan vacation. The pattern is written for knitting the body in one piece, but I converted it for flat knitting. Smaller pieces are much more portable. Also, this is a hand-dyed yarn, and rather than worry about alternating skeins and color changes, I just decided to knit the different pieces from different skeins and not worry about color shade differences.

Japan souvenirs

I just returned from a vacation to Japan, spending 4 nights in Tokyo and 3 nights in Kyoto. I had a great time, even though I got bitten by a gazillion insects and the plane ride home was a breeding ground for respiratory infections because of all these passengers who were sneezing, wheezing, coughing, and phlegming (I don't think that's a verb). Of course, in addition to the sightseeing, I had to look for a few yarn shops and buy some souvenir yarn.

My first stop was at Okadaya in Tokyo. This is a seven story craft shop, with most of the 6th floor devoted to yarn and other knitting goodness. The address is 3-23-17 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, very near the train station. Thanks to pinku for posting a list of Tokyo shops back in 2006. Now, even though I had the address, it's still not easy to find it. Although I knew that the Tokyo address consists of the subareaNumber-blockNumber-buildingNumber, I did not know that the building numbers are not spatially ordered. I found out later that they are ordered by their construction dates. So, you sometimes have to walk around a block to find an address. Also, not all blocks have their numbers displayed anywhere, and many shops don't display their own addresses. After a while, I realized that for larger shops, it's easiest to just look upward for large signs instead of looking at doorways!

They have a large selection of Japanese and imported yarns. I just decided to focus on the Japanese brands.

I ended up purchasing 8 skeins of this really luxurious merino/alpaca/acrylic yarn. Don't you just love the phrasing on the label?

Next up was a trip to La Droguerie, which is a French craft store with several shops in Japan. The Tokyo address is 4-13-9 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, in the very chi-chi Omotesando shopping district. They have a smallish selection of pricey yarn, but tons of unique trims, beads, and buttons, also pricey.


I ended up buying some buttons and spent enough to receive a promotional giveaway bag. (Notice the Eiffel tower bead).

Now, on to Kyoto. While there, I decided to check out the Kyoto branch of La Droguerie. It's located on Kitiyama-dori, right across the street from the Kitiyama entrance to the wonderful Kyoto botanical garden, and we were going to visit the garden anyway. The merchandise seemed to be about the same as in the Tokyo store, although there might have been more yarn. I just bought a few not-very-exciting beads to hang on that safety-pin closure that I bought earlier.

Next was Avril, which is sold in New York as Habu Textiles. They are located in a restored building called the Sacra building in the center of the shopping zone, at the corner of Sanjo-dori and Tominokoji-dori. The shop space is like a huge loft, and they have an amazing collection of yarn, many with unusual textures and exotic fibers, and much of it costing more than I would ever spend on yarn.





However, even the priciest of shops has a sale basket, and in it I found this great textured wool/nylon yarn in fall colors. I bought 2 skeins.

In the same building as Avril is the Idola buttons and beads shop. It is smallish, but stocks a lot of very unusual buttons.


I ended up buying just two of these silvery buttons.

The amazing thing is -- I managed to pack all of this into my luggage!

FO: Textured Cardi for fall

This is the textured cardigan by Rebecca Taylor in Vogue Knitting fall 2010. This is a fun cardi to wear. On the front, it wears just like a long shrug, and on the back, it feels like I'm wearing a stole. It's comfy and cozy without being overly warm. The yarn is Shepherd's Wool from Stonehenge Fiber Mill, which is really nice and soft and is not itchy to me.

This garment is just knitted as a rectangle and then cleverly seamed to create the sleeves. For the body, the only thing I did differently was to add 2 stitches on what would become the front edge. I knit them on the right side, and slipped the first stitch on the purl side. This creates a neater and tighter front edge.

I decided to just use the same yarn for the pockets instead of trying to find a matching fine-gauged yarn. Since the yarn is heavier, I only made the pockets 38 stitches wide and my cables are 6 stitches each instead of 10 so they aren't as dense.

For the bottom back ribbing, I had to sew a slanted seam that starts out about 1" wide and narrows down to one stitch. If I didn't do that, that bottom section pokes up and outward and looks like the rear end of a duck. I recently saw a ready-to-wear version of this sweater by Rebecca Taylor at Bloomingdale's. The stitch pattern is not the same and the pockets are bigger, but it's definitely the same cut and shape. For that sweater, the back bottom ribbing is knit with increases so that you get the same mitered effect with a normal seam. It's interesting that the knitting pattern does not reflect this.


I love the shape of this cardi-shrug enough that I'm going to try and a make a much shorter version of it. I'll find a simpler stitch pattern, and I will change the shaping a bit by using increases and decreases to create a V-shape for the bottom of the back -- that way the front sections won't have to pull up so much to joing the back and the back bottom will be relatively flat.

Knitting updates

I've been making progress on Goodale. I'm adding increases to the front sections so that the sweater will not be as open. I'm also making it a bit lon ger and adding some side shaping. Progress has been slow because I've been sidetracked with knitting this textured cardigan by Rebecca Taylor from Vogue Knitting Fall 2010.

I was fascinated with this pattern the moment I saw it in the magazine's online preview. I love the texture and the unique construction. What's interesting to me is that I'm the one and only person on ravelry who is knitting this garment, and there are only 11 others who have queued it up. I wonder why so few other knitters find it as fascinating as I do.

This is really a simple knit because you just knit a 6 ft x 18" rectangle and sew it up. It's just like knitting a scarf for a very large person. I have to admit that it's getting a bit monotonous, especially since there are a lot of P3tog stitches in the pattern, but I've got about 4 ft. done, so onward I go!

Sewing FO

I've finished a sewing project, and I LOVE this dress. The pattern is Vogue V8552, with a few mods. I avoid sewing a lot of dresses because they usually require a big fitting effort, and to do it right requires sewing up a muslin version for at least the bodice portion, and I'm too lazy to do muslins. This pattern is an easy fitting one, so I figured I could adjust it as I go, and I wouldn't need to do what The Other Half would call "fire a test shot".

For the mods, I added waistline tucks to the front to give it a little more shape. I narrowed the pockets a bit and also widened the placement. I really liked those gaping pockets in the photo, but in person, they stuck out way too much. The dress is unlined, but I decided to line both the pockets and the cap sleeves with a contrasting green cotton. The pattern called for sewing down the pocket flaps, but I decided to just tack the corners down by hand, and I sewed a button on each corner of the flaps.

My fabric is a heavy weight linen that I purchased at a local fabric shop in San Francisco. (Is there such an acronym as "LFS" in the sewing world"?). I subsequently looked for it online and found it sold here as drapery fabric. I should keep drapery fabric in mind in the future if I want heavy weight linen.

I'm thinking of making this pattern again with a much softer fabric and sewing the side pockets. I might also just sew the tucks as inside pleats, and wear it with a thin belt.

If I saw this dress hanging on a rack in a shop, I would probably never try it on because I would dismiss it as shapeless and unflattering. This reminds me that I should be a little more willing to try on garments because sometimes, they just look quite different when worn.

FO: Ambrosia

I've finished Amnbrosia from Interweave Knits Summer 2010. This is actually not quite Ambrosia because my front cables are more squiggly because I sort of neglected to read the cable pattern and just did something that I thought looked like the picture. It doesn't quite look like the picture, but I didn't even notice until I finished the entire body of the sweater! The yarn is Classic Silk from Classic Elite Yarns. I had a hard time capturing the color in photos -- it's sort of the color of a fruit smoothie.

I'm very happy with this sweater. In addition to the accidental difference in cable design, some other mods include omitting the waistline ribbing and using a single crochet followed by reverse single crochet trim on the neckline instead of the I-cord. I added one stitch on edge side of the cables and slipped that stitch at the start of each row, then applied a row of crocheted slip stitches onto the edge for the finishing. This gave me sturdy and non-stretchy front edges. For the sleeves, I went down one needle size shortly after picking up the stitches, then went down one more size for the ribbing. I wanted to ensure that the sleeve openings don't flare out.

For the fasteners, I bought some jumbo hook and eye tape, which made the job a lot easier. I especially like the large-sized hooks and eyes. What I don't like is that it's white in color -- it doesn't show through on the front, but you can see the white inside if you look down onto the neckline. It's not a big deal, but I wonder if I should have dyed it or something before using it.