Some Sewing, Shopping, and Shipping

For my honorary niece Olivia's 8th birthday, I did some sewing and some shopping. 

 

 

 

For most of Olivia's existence, my practice has been to make her a wool sweater for Christmas and a cotton summer dress and matching purse for her birthday, which is in May. This year I decided to go with a cotton jumpsuit, partly to change things up and partly because I thought Olivia might get more real wear out of it, but mostly because when I saw the above pattern, which is McCalls M7917, there was no resisting such a cute design.  

I chose a cotton print to make it with that is pictured at the head of this post. It's the "Cookbook" fabric, by Riley Blake Designs.
 

 

 

 

The finished jumpsuit, made in View C and size 8, and the matching purse, the purse being made from a 20+ year-old pattern from Vogue (V9893) that I've used and reused half to death. I didn't seem to have anything I could use on this purse for trim, but looking at the photo of it now, I wish I'd tried harder and come up with something. It looks so plain that way.  

 

 

 

I also bought Olivia a thrift shop copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, and a dollar store unicorn craft kit that Olivia can paint and assemble herself.  

In the fall of 2023, a hoped-for visit to Olivia's house had to be cancelled. I hoped it could be rescheduled to January 2024, so I didn't send her intended Christmas present to her in December 2023, and then that trip didn't happen either. By the time March 2024 rolled around and I'd given up hope of a visit in the near future, I decided just to hang onto her Christmas present and send it along with her birthday present. Then I was late getting her birthday present ready. It was the end of July 2024 before I finally shipped Olivia's combined Christmas and birthday gift to her. (Bad aunt! Bad!) 

But Olivia didn't seem to mind the delay, and she had the pleasure of opening quite a large, elaborate gift that contained not only the jumpsuit, purse, book and craft gift contained above, but also a sweater, hat, novel and designer activity book AND a witch costume complete with broomstick and cat for the doll she'd received from me for her 7th birthday, one Miss Rainbow Sparkle Unicorn-Animals. Lindsie called me right after Olivia opened her gift, and though Olivia took a shy fit and wouldn't come to the phone to thank me as Lindsie wanted, I could hear her squealing away in the background. 

Olivia's favourite item out of all of those things was the black cat. My idea was that the cat would be Rainbow's pet cat (or familiar, when she was wearing her witch outfit), but Olivia didn't see it that way. The cat was hers and only hers, and she named it Blackie. I suggested some other names that might be suitable for a black cat (i.e., Ebony, Sable, Raven, Coal, Midnight), but no, Blackie it was and would remain. 

I'm also happy to say that as I type this in late October 2024, I have Olivia's Christmas 2024 present all ready to go, so she'll get her Christmas present in good time this year, taking this honorary aunt at least temporarily off the naughty list.

The "Take a Look at Me Now" Truck Sweater

My little grandnephew Sawyer is obsessed with vehicles and tools, or, as my family and I say to each other either sagely or resignedly, "He's a Swan man." I met Sawyer for the first time on Christmas Day 2023 when he was 22 months old, and he had very little interest in interacting with all the family around him. He spent the entire time playing with the toy racetrack in the basement rec room, and when upstairs, with the decorative toy train that ran on a track around the Christmas tree. He would not even take time away from his toy trucks to open his Christmas presents. His father opened Sawyer's gifts for him, and if the present was a vehicle of some kind, it would be handed over to Sawyer and he would be delighted and play with it, but otherwise he wouldn't so much as look at it. My gift to him was a dinosaur sweater and a toy stuffed dinosaur, and Sawyer never even glanced at them. My takeaway from that day, besides the one big smile that I got from him when I spoke to him about the train set (and that glows in my memory like a light), was that going forward my gifts to him needed to be vehicle-themed if I wanted him to give them the time of day.

For his second birthday in February, I sent Sawyer a storybook about trucks and one of those matching card games with pictures of trucks on the back. And though I'd chosen a striped sweater pattern for his Christmas 2024 sweater in the fall of 2023, some months later I decided to have a look through the Ravelry database to see what kind of vehicle-themed patterns it offered.

I very soon zeroed in on the cute little number above, which is the s34-15 Tiny Trucker pattern, by Drops Design. It's a free pattern. 

For the yarn, I purchased 100 grams of Sandnes Garn Double Sunday in 8082 Forest Green, and 100 grams of Sandnes Garn Double Sunday in 1015 Putty. Sawyer has blond hair and hazel eyes, and green and cream are colours that suit him well.

The completed sweater. I knitted the body as far as the armholes, then when making the first sleeve, realized I would not have enough green to do both the sleeves. 

Rather than buy another skein of green and only use a bit of it, I looked through my stash to see what I had that could be used to piece out the other two new yarns. I found a partial skein of olive green DK that seemed to work, so I knitted the two sleeves insofar as I could with the rest of the forest green yarn, using it all up, then knitted in a block of the olive green on each sleeve. I was worried I would run short of the putty too, so I knitted somewhat beyond where the putty colour was supposed to start. (I think I made the right call on that -- I had just 9 grams of the putty left when I finished the sweater.) Then, when the sweater was finished, I used the olive green to embroider on the truck. 

I think my frugal makeshift version looks just as good as the designer sample, though I do wish I'd ripped out a little of the forest green on the body, knitted in a stripe of olive, and used the dark green to do the truck duplicate stitch. But it looks nice the way it is, and I saved myself the price of two skeins of new yarn by working in a third colour from my stash.  

I bought a colouring book with lots of cars in it, and a box of crayons to go with the sweater, and it's my hope the truck sweater and the car colouring book will at least warrant a look from Sawyer. 

When I finished this project, I had used all the new forest green yarn, all but 9 grams of the putty, and 18 grams of the stash olive green, so that is a net stash decrease of 9 grams. 

A Straw Hat for Summer

One of the items on my wardrobe needs list this spring was a straw hat. I had a twill fabric trilby with a tartan band that I'd sewn myself in 2015, and a commercially made ivory knit floppy hat that must be nearly twenty years old, but I also seemed to have a number of summer outfits neither of them worked with, and I wanted to be able to prevent sun damage and (more) wrinkles with some style, not to mention receive fewer scoldings from my dermatologist. 

After scouring the nearby Dufferin Mall and the Stockyards for a suitable straw hat, I bought the classic panama straw you see above at Walmart for $21.47. I thought the PVC leather band and plastic ring trim was ugly, but I could remove it and retrim the hat myself. The problem with inexpensive hats often is the trim, by the way. So many of the hats I saw when shopping for a hat this past spring were a good shape and not bad quality and trimmed in an inexplicably tacky and/or hideous way. If you find an inexpensive or thrift shop hat in a size and shape you like and a trim you don't, keep in mind that you can change the trim pretty easily and inexpensively, but do watch out for the glue that will be left behind. You probably won't be able to replace a wide hat band with a narrower one, or leave it untrimmed, because you'll need to cover up the dried gobs of glue that will be left behind. This is why in traditional millinery hat trims are always sewn in place, making it possible for one to refresh an old hat with new trim without anyone being the wiser. 

When I got the hat home, I did some googling and searches on Pinterest to get ideas on how to retrim a straw panama. According to my research, hey are usually simply trimmed with a band of black or white grosgrain ribbon, with perhaps a flat bow on the side. This was fine by me, as I wanted a simple hat I could wear with everything. On my next trip downtown, I purchased a metre of wide ivory grosgrain for $2. 

 

 

The finished hat. Retrimming a hat is always harder for me than I expect. I have trouble visualizing it, always end up redoing it a few times, am never confident in the results, and even when I declare the job done always feel I haven't gotten it quite right. But I think this one is fairly satisfactory. It's simple and fresh looking, and will go with any of of my summer outfits. Not a bad outcome for $23.47 and the time and effort I put into this relatively easy project. 

Pleasantly Generic and Useful

My grandniece Cauliflower is to turn 15 this summer, and as always, her birthday will be marked by a sweater from yours truly.  

Cauliflower is probably physically full-grown now, and wears a women's size small in sweaters and tops. Surreal as I find it to be the great-aunt of a grandniece just three years away from becoming an adult, it does open up the sweater pattern options, there being far more patterns for women than there are for children or tweens. But I didn't spend long browsing. I decided that since her sweater from last year was a solid colour and a worsted, that this sweater would be patterned and either DK or fingering, I looked through the knitting patterns I have saved to my Pinterest board, and I soon came across the one you see above, which is the Gardengate pattern, designed by Jennifer Steingass. 

For yarn, I purchased 450 grams of Sandnes Garn Sisu in Blue for the main colour, and 100 gram skein of Lang Yarns Super Soxx Silk for the contrast colour. The colours should look good on Cauliflower, who has light brown hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. 

The finished sweater, which I knitted up exactly as specified by the pattern in a size 36. The colours and the pattern are pretty, but I'm not too thrilled with the proportions of this sweater. The yoke is very deep and the sleeves look too long. I just hope it doesn't sit too poorly on Cauliflower. 

I returned two skeins of the blue yarn, and had just 13 grams of the blue and 57 grams of the variegated contrast colour left, for a stash increase of 70 grams. 

As for the little extra trinkets that I like to include when giving one of my grandnieces or grandnephews a piece of homemade clothing, I purchased a little notebook and pen and some hand lotion from Dollarama. I don't know what Cauliflower's tastes are, and at 50 I am probably hopelessly out of touch with what teenaged girls like these days, so I stuck with pleasantly generic and useful. 

Little Red Dress

In 2023, I knitted myself a striped cotton dress for summer, an idea of mine that had been in the works for several years. This year I scratched another longish-term knitting goal off my list: knitting myself a dress for winter.

Perhaps five or six years ago, I happened to come across a cute worsted knitted dress pattern and decided I wanted to make it, but somehow I was never able to find the right yarn for it. As several years passed, I began to consider whether I wanted to make that particular dress after all. It was one of those designs that looked very cute in its designer's sample shots, and not so good on the Ravelry members who had made it. And I don't really like wearing worsted weight knits. I found I still wanted a knitted dress for winter, but was that one really my best option? Once I asked myself that question, the obvious next step was to search the Ravelry database for knitted dresses in DK to see what other options I had. It didn't take long before I settled on the one you see above, which is the Little Red Dress, designed by Cathy Carron. It has good texture, a nice body skimming shape, cowl necks really suit me, and it was a design that looked really good on pretty much every Ravelry member who had made it, a sure sign of a winner.   

I still had trouble finding yarn for this project. I thought about how I would wear this dress, and soon concluded it was something I would want to wear with dark brown tights, my dark brown leather riding boots, and probably also a dark brown belt. (Most of the Ravelry members who had made the dress styled theirs with belts, and the dress looked better belted than not.) So I needed a colour that would work with dark brown. The "knitted wool dress" sat on my project list for a few more years while I looked for just the right DK. Plum would have been my first colour choice for this project, but I couldn't find yarn in the shade I wanted. I didn't want a neutral colour as that would have looked too drab, and I wasn't sure I wanted to wear a whole dress in some of the other colours I like, such as turquoise, spring green, or orange. In the end, I just bought 1500 grams of red yarn, or more specifically, Sandnes Garn Alpakka in Red. I like red, it suits me, and a classic red is definitely a wearable, practical choice, but I even with the dress a done deal, I can't help wishing I'd been able to get the plum yarn I wanted.    

A not great photo of the completed dress, made in size 39.25. I don't have anyone to take photos of me and therefore couldn't model it myself, so I had to put it on my dress form, on which the dress looks as though it were designed to fit a Lego person. I assure you it does not look that way on me, as I have legs. (Not to mention arms, and a head, and quite a lot of other things.)  

I modified the pattern by extending the moss stitch panels. I'm very well-endowed, and while on the model the moss stitch detailing ends below the bustline, on me it would have ended mid-bust or even above that. Lengthening the moss stitch panels enough to fall below my bustline would have meant ending them a few inches above my waistline, which I thought would look awkward, so I just went the distance and had the bodice detailing end at the waist. The dress would also have been too short on me, so I lengthened it to 41" in length, which reaches to just above my knees. My modifications don't seem to have detracted from the overall style, and I was pleased with the results. 

After I'd taken the requisite detail and full-length shots of this dress, I spent some time playing with the various belts from my closet to see how they'd look. I like the medium brown belt the best, as the other two look a little Santa Claus-y, but again, I intend to wear this dress with brown tights and riding boots, or maybe my brown high-heeled lace ups, and the dark brown belt would look best with those. Therefore I'll probably go with one of the dark brown belts, and if anyone yells "HO HO HO" at me when I'm wearing the ensemble... try to bear in mind that there are a few ways in which they might have meant it. 

A Bewitching Project

In July 2023, when I gave a knitted doll and an accompanying wardrobe of seven outfits to my honorary niece Olivia, there was an eighth outfit I really wanted to include with the rest but couldn't because it wasn't quite finished. Now that it finally is, I'm going to include the outfit in Olivia's birthday present in May 2024, and give her the ballerina outfit I made for her doll in late 2023 sometime in 2025. That way, Olivia will get one new outfit for her doll per year, and I get to take 2024 off from making doll stuff. 

When I was going through Sarah Gasson's library of doll outfit designs to pick out the ones I want to make in future, the Witch outfit was an automatic yes. I love witches, the outfit is cute, and Olivia would surely enjoy having a nice Halloween costume for her beloved Rainbow Sparkle Unicorn-Animals. 

Then I decided that if Olivia was going to dress up her baby as a witch, Rainbow really ought to have a familiar. A cat seemed the obvious choice, as Olivia's family has three cats and she is cat-obsessed. I searched Ravelry for a suitable small cat toy design, and ended up deciding on the Wub Chub Cat Ornament, by Button Willow Knits. 

As for the yarn for these two projects, I looked in my stash and found that I had 70 grams of a tan DK that would make a good broomstick, 50 grams of assorted odds and ends of cream DK that would do for the trim on the dress and the paws, chest, and muzzle of the cat, and 40 grams of black DK that could be used for the dress and cat, though of course I would need more than that. I went to Michaels and bought three skeins of Patons Astra in Black and, when the only orange DK in stock proved to be a Dayglo/pylon type orange, one skein of Patons Astra Hot Lilac for the accent colour on the witch outfit.  

The completed witch outfit on Ms. Rainbow Sparkle Unicorn-Animals. It turned out satisfactorily. I think the one change I made to this ensemble was to use a wooden dowel rod instead of a straw for the broomstick. It should stand up better that way. 

I really was very close to getting the witch ensemble done in time to give it to Olivia last July -- I just hadn't assembled the cat. But I didn't want to give Olivia the doll's witch outfit without the cat to go with it, so I held it back.

The cat. I can't believe how long it took me to make myself finish this thing. I had done all the knitting by the end of June 2023, and then all the pieces sat in a little plastic bag in my workbasket with me putting it on my to do list every day for months until I finally finished assembling it in March 2024. I don't really like making toys to begin with, and this one involved a lot of very fiddly details. I also made the most unwelcome discovery that my embroidery skills, which I've always thought of as basic, actually rank below that in a class I can only describe as "they suck". 

I didn't want to go to the expense of buying plastic cat eyes, so I embroidered the eyes. I couldn't make the claw embroidery stitches look right despite five or six attempts, so I didn't do those at all. 

The result, while not great, isn't so terribly bad for a toy for a eight-year-old, and at least Rainbow is going to be a properly equipped little witch with her very own black kitty cat.   

When I was finished this project, I found I had used up 25 grams of the tan, 33 grams of the cream, and all of the new black yarn plus 26 grams of the stash black yarn I had. I was left with just 10 grams of the new lilac yarn. That's a net stash decrease of 74 grams, which isn't so bad for a little project like this.  

 

A Plum of a Pullover

This project plan began when I decided I wanted a plum sweater to go with a velvet skirt I made for myself some years back. This sweater is the second plum-coloured thing I made for myself in 2023, and it was only after I'd finished the first project (a striped summer dress) and was well into working on this one that I learned that Viva Magenta was Pantone's Colour of the Year for 2023. My 2024 project list is all set to go, so looked up Pantone's Colour of the Year for 2024 to find out if I was unwittingly in accord with it too. The 2024 colour is Peach Fuzz. All I can say about that is there is one project out of the twelve I have planned for 2024 that uses a little peach yarn. 

For a pattern, I turned to one of my slightly battered back copies of Vogue Knitting. The design you see above is from Vogue Knitting's Fall 1992 issue. It's Pattern #03, the Diamond Cable Pullover, designed by Michele Woodford. I liked its lush texture and its collar. I didn't love the long, oversized, rectangular shape that was The Thing in women's fashion in the early 1990s and that flattered no one, but of course I could easily reshape and resize the sweater. I often reshape knitting patterns anyway, and this kind of reshaping is often necessary when one is using vintage knitting patterns. Proportions change, and what was considered a stylish shape in one era can look simply dated, frumpy, awkward, and/or unflattering in another. If you knit up a vintage pattern exactly as it was written, you may find you're not happy with the result, but a simple tweaking of the shape/proportions can update the garment into a piece that retains whatever qualities you found attractive in the original version and that looks current and flattering. 

The lovely yarn used to make the sample sweater had been discontinued. I had to spend some time looking for a suitable yarn for this sweater. I wanted a plum yarn with a halo, such as a mohair or an angora, as I didn't think the stitchwork of this particular design would look nearly as good in a matte yarn. This wasn't easy -- there's very little selection when it comes to yarns and materials in plum. But eventually I found something that would work for me: Garnstudio Brushed Alpaca Silk in shade 9, or Lilla. 

I had to come up with my own estimate for how much yarn I was going to need. To do so, I looked at Ravelry projects that used the Brushed Alpaca Silk in similarly sized projects. I concluded that I probably needed seven 25 gram skeins, or 175 grams total, but should get eight skeins or 200 grams of the yarn to be on the safe side. I purchased seven skeins at Romni Wools in December 2022, and put in an order for an eighth skein. Four months later I received a call from a Romni employee saying that the colour had been discontinued and that my order was cancelled. Uh oh! But I'd begun the project by that point -- I had a sleeve knitted and several inches of the back done -- and I reminded myself that I had thought seven would likely be sufficient, so I decided to forge ahead with it and deal with a yarn shortage situation if and when it arose. Happily, it did not: I was able to easily finish the sweater with the seven skeins I'd bought.   

The completed sweater with the velvet skirt. I made the sweater in a size 38, shortened the length to 23" (as opposed to the 28" inches the sample shot was!), added waist shaping, and added armhole shaping to raise the dropped shoulders. I have almost no neck and high turtleneck collars are not my friend, so I shaped the neckline of the front to be an inch lower and 1.25" wider than the pattern specified in an effort to achieve more of a cowl neck. 

 I'm pretty pleased with the result, which is a nice update of the original design. The sweater is less opaque than I would like, but that's nothing wearing a camisole underneath can't compensate for, and the sweater does go very well with the skirt. 

I had my concerns about whether I'd be able to find suitable buttons for this project, but Fabricland came through for me as they nearly always do. 

This yarn was newly purchased for this project, and I finished with 10 grams of it to spare, so that's a stash increase of 10 grams.

A Ballerina Outfit for Rainbow

In July 2023, I gave my honorary niece Olivia a knitted doll and an accompanying wardrobe of seven little doll outfits as part of her seventh birthday present. Olivia named the doll Rainbow Sparkle Unicorn-Animals, and routinely dresses her up every morning and then changes her into her striped onesie and teddy bear slippers every night before taking her off to bed. What I'd like to do is freshen up Rainbow's wardrobe a little every year by giving Olivia another outfit for the doll every birthday until she's ten or so.

Sarah Gasson's Knit A Teddy pattern collection offers so many varied and irresistibly cute outfit designs that it can be hard to choose from among them, but as soon as I saw the ballerina outfit I knew I just had to make it.

I'm not so much a fan of pink, though I know that pink, white, and black are the classic palette for ballet wear. For Rainbow's ballerina outfit, I chose a 100 gram skein of James C. Brett Double Knitting with Merino in cream and a second 100 gram skein of Wendy With Wool DK in a sage green. Cream and light green are a fresh, pretty combination, and it's not like Rainbow will have some ballet teacher on her case insisting that she cannot deviate from the designated uniform for the class. 

 

 

The completed outfit. I wish I had Rainbow here for a few minutes to model it for me, since it would show to much better advantage on her than it does lying on my desk, but oh well. This little ballet tutu, surplice sweater, ballet slippers, and headband were fun to make and only took me about a week. The one thing I had some technical difficulty with was sewing the tutu onto the leotard. I could not seem to figure out how to keep my line of sewing stitches on the same horizontal row of knitted stitches, and I must have made five separate attempts to attach the tutu and gotten it on crooked every time. In the end, I wove a length of green yarn through the stitches of the row above the one I wanted to stitch the tutu to, used the green yarn as a guideline while sewing on the tutu, and then pulled out the length of green yarn when I was done. I wish I'd been quicker to come up with a plan to keep my stitches even. 

The other thing I would do differently if I were to make this ballerina outfit again would be to find a nicer, and probably crocheted, flower pattern for the headband. This knitted one looks a little rough and ready.

However, the outfit is very cute as a whole and I am looking forward to giving it to Olivia for her eighth birthday in May 2024. I can see Rainbow doing pirouettes in her little ballerina outfit already.  

I had 25 grams of the cream yarn left and 51 grams of the green yarn left over when I finished this project, so that's a stash increase of 76 grams for this project. 

Socks For Whooooom?

Awhile back I had a look through the owl patterns in Ravelry's pattern database to see what useful gift ideas I could come up with for the owl aficionados in my family. 

The Owlie Socks, designed by Julie Elswick Suchomel, stood out to me as a cute and suitable pattern. In 2023 I decided to knit my mother a pair for Christmas. As I've talked about before on this blog, my mother is very difficult to buy presents for, but she likes practical gifts and owls, and she would certainly like and be able to use a pair of warm black owl socks.  

For the yarn, I selected a skein of Berrocco Vintage Sock in Cast Iron, or what I would less poetically describe as black.  

The finished pair of socks. I reluctantly opted not to put beads on this pair of socks as in the sample photo. The beads do add a lot to the design, but beads also add a lot of weight to a knitted item and they feel cold against the skin in winter weather, and at 85, my mother prioritizes comfort and practicality over the aesthetic value of something no one else is even going to notice. 

My mother liked the socks when she opened them on Christmas Day, though she commented they were "too thick" for trouser socks and she'd save them for cold days. 

This project was knitted entirely out of new yarn purchased specifically for this project, and there were 30 grams of yarn left, so that's a stash increase of 30 grams.