What!? Sewing??

Yes, sewing! It has been a long time I've been sewing something, somewhere in the 80's I think. This summer I thought about picking it up again. So I enrolled for a sewing course and last Thursday I had my first lesson. Sewing is like riding a bike, or swimming, or knitting. You never forget how to. But these days clothes are much more complicated than the clothes I made twenty years ago. Everything was straight and wide, now everything is much tighter and really has to fit well. So I thought I could use some help with that. And besides that I always find it stimulating to learn something together with other people. That's why I love to take courses. This season, besides the sewing, I'm taking classes in English and an introduction course in webdesign.

But, back to the sewing, I'm going to make a skirt. Here's a picture of it, together with the fabric I bought, a kind of black & green tweed. The green is a limegreen.

I've been working almost all day on it (= crawling around on the floor), and I'm sure my muscles will hurt tomorrow. I pinned all the parts of the pattern on the fabric and now I'm making loops around them with yarn. This takes a lot of time and maybe it is old fashioned. But they will tell me that next Thursdaynight. Laughing their heads off, probably.

For the black stripes between the different parts, I need to cut stripes of the fabric. These I have to unravel for 1 cm. Takes quite a lot of time as well, as you can imagine. Well, I hope it's all going to be worthwile....

And knitting? Yes, I still am. I've finished a sleeve and the left front of the cardigan, and I'm still working on the Birch-shawl, which is coming along nicely.

Start of the VERY cheap cardigan

A while ago I explored the Rekal-website, about recycling old sweaters. And I liked it. I'm Dutch, remember? So I went to a thriftshop to find a nice sweater I could unravel. There wasn't much I liked, as I expected. Only one handknitted sweater did have nice colours, although the yarn was something acrylic. But it costed only 3 euro's so I had to take it home. I think I don't like acrylic yarns, but that might be a prejudice. I don't like secondhand clothes very much either, by the way. I (washed and washed) and unravelled the sweater which was quite a lot of work. Yesterday I started knitting the left front of a cardigan. And look, it's almost finished!

Doesn't look bad at all, does it? And it's a completely different knit from the Birch-shawl, which is nice for a change. I'm using a pattern of an old Filati-book (of Lanagrossa). Too bad I'm (still) not creative enough to make my own pattern. Or am I too lazy?

Tonight I've been watching Art School on BBC2 again, speaking of creativity. I really love that series! Six celebrities following an intensive two-week course at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Every night from 7.00 - 8.00 (in the Netherlands). Only this week. Don't miss it!

No, I wasn't away

Just wasn't in the mood for blogging. And the weather was too lovely to knit a lot, so I didn't make much progress with my knitting projects. But now I finally sewed on the strap to my felted Knitty-bag. This is what it looks like now:

Although I like the result, I'm not totally satisfied with it: 1. In the pattern there's nothing about how to fasten this bag. I think it's not a good idea to leave it open, so I bought a zipper. 2. When you put some lumpy things in the bag it's looking really akward because it stretches a lot. The best solution is probably to linen it. So, zipper, linen, both? I don't know yet.

My other WIP is slowly progressing. After quite a few rows the knitting became a lot easier and I like the result now:

I hope I have enough yarn, though. I spilled quite some in my first attempts. By the way, I found some useful tips about Birch on this site.

And now I seriously have to think about my next project(s). Still have to buy new sock yarn, for cabled socks. But what else? I have this in my stash:

Some time ago I bought a secondhand sweater in a thriftshop and I unravelled it. It's a blue/grey acrylic yarn and I want to make a cardigan of it, a little like Jennifer Thurston's Nimbus. Without the hood, I don't have enough yarn for that, but with the grey fluffy borders.