I don’t like showing other people’s wedding things in their entirety before the wedding, so this is just a little snapshot of Laura’s beaded wedding bag.
The ivory silk dupion was already beaded and embroidered. I removed some of the clear beads, and replaced them with red ones. You can also see the pretty flower shaped iridescent button, there in the bottom right hand corner.
Laura and Rob are getting married in September.
Congratulations!
Apparently I now have some kind of Pavlovian reaction to the sound of tweeting. Every time I hear a bird, I grab the camera.
This one was snapped through the window, with the 200mm lens. (Hence the distance and the graininess.) Still cute though!
It’s a baby Great Tit. They fledged last week, in the pouring rain, but the parents are still bringing them food whenever they TWEET LIKE MANIACS. Which is quite a lot of the time, it has to be said.
The BBC programme Springwatch have an official Flickr group where you can upload your spring-related pictures. I’ve sent in some of my birds. There are some truly amazing photos there – all of which are only reinforcing my desire for a bigger lens!
I’d always wondered why you weren’t supposed to wash silk. I bought three metres of ivory dupion a little while ago, but it had a dirty mark on it, so I knew I was going to have to clean it somehow. In a fit of “what the heck”, I chucked it in the washing machine, on cold, with a bit of Ecover wool & silk detergent.
The dirty mark came out just fine, but unfortunately a couple of strands of bright pink silk had made it into the washing machine, stuck to the ivory.
The reason you don’t wash silk dupion?
It isn’t colour fast.
Oops.
As it turns out, this isn’t a disaster. I’m planning to make a summer shirt for myself, so I don’t mind if it has a couple of pink squiggles on it. Although I’m kind of hoping that the next time I wash it, the pink marks will come out again.
This is a knitting pattern from 1977. My sister and I (and probably my Mum and Dad as well) wore many incarnations of this cardigan over the years, all knitted by my Mum.
Once you’ve stopped laughing at the extremely dated styling on the pattern cover, this is actually a really nice cardigan. It can be knitted either in chunky yarn, or with two strands of double knitting held together. You can choose between a collar or a hood. It doesn’t give instructions for pockets, but I think if I knitted this again, I’d add them.
I think the only thing I’d do differently is the buttonholes. The moss stitch border is five stitches wide, but you make the buttonholes only one stitch away from the edge. I think I’d move them over, just by one more stitch, to give the button band a bit more stability. Admittedly I have sewn on rather large and heavy buttons, so I might reinforce the bands on this one with a strip of fabric.
I did really want to knit the hood, but it turned out that twelve balls of Debbie Bliss Soho wasn’t quite enough. Just one more ball would have done the hood, and probably a pair of pockets as well. One of the problems with older patterns is that they don’t give the weight or yardage of the specified yarn, so you just have to try and make an educated guess.
Now I just need to decide which yarn I want to use for my next one…
As well as taking over the world with tunics, I also want to make a couple of new additions to my summer wardrobe.
This shirt is McCalls 5433, and it’s a Palmer Pletsch design.
I was a bit startled to discover that the instructions ran to seven pages, and was worried that the shirt would turn out to be unnecessarily complicated. As it turns out, the first two pages are a very useful guide to tissue fitting. It also gives the details for several common alterations, such as how to make a full bust adjustment, and how to accommodate a high back or rounded shoulder. I didn’t know that Palmer Pletsch produced a range of sewing books and DVDs, but they look really useful!
I’ll be making the longest shirt, with the longest sleeves. In a lightweight lawn this should hopefully be the perfect summer cover-up.
