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.