Dress

Some years ago I bought a cashmere dress that I really liked. I wore it endlessly, to the point where I had mended it way beyond what was reasonable. I would have liked to buy another, but unfortunately the company that made it had altered the style soon after I bought mine and the new version had features I disliked.

So eventually I decided the only solution was to make my own similar dress. And I'm wearing it as I type this.

It is not at all difficult to do if you already have a garment you can measure as a basis.

I wanted a long-sleeved dress (the original had had three-quarter length sleeves), I wanted it a bit below knee length (longer than the original), and I wanted it to be raglan instead of with set-in sleeves.

I started with a large swatch on 2mm needles in a black 100% cashmere yarn. As my yarn was an oiled industrial yarn I washed and deoiled my swatch before measuring it.

Then it was a matter of drawing an extremely basic sketch of what I wanted and putting in measurements. As I was going to knit seamlessly in the round I started with circumference measurements (of the existing garment, not of me!) I adjusted these measurements to add length to the skirt and sleeves.

Then I could convert these measurements into stitch numbers on the basis of my swatch. The lengths between the points with different numbers of stitches gives you the number of rows, making it easy to see how often to decrease or increase to get the right numbers.

As this dress was stocking stitch with turned up hems, I did not have to consider ribbing, and I knew that my basic raglan decrease could happen every other round.

 I'm about to start knitting another dress to this pattern, and the only change I am going to make is to start the front of the neck a centimetre lower and raise the back of the neck slightly.

As long as you have an existing garment which you like the fit of, it really is easy to create your own garment!



Memories of summer

It's cold and set to get colder, and stay colder for days. Snow is forecast for many parts of the country. So here are some summer memories to warm us up.



Tatted Fan

I made this tatted fan in 1996 from a pattern by a Dublin-based tatter called Anne Keller. She also provided the fan sticks, which were painted to order by her with white wisteria blossoms. She also put me on to the gentleman who made the shaped frame for the fan though I haven't put a note of his name in my album.

It was tatted in DMC 100 thread, which was not difficult once I had got used to it. The part that drove me to distraction was hiding all the ends of thread as the pattern involves lots of tiny motifs which really are not big enough to hide the ends easily.

When I look at it now I feel it is far from perfect but people are always struck by it so I have to remember that I'm the only person who sees its imperfections! But that is always the way with people.

 I remember once trying to comfort a lady who was living in an expensive rented flat. A accidental flood on the floor above her had left a mark on the ceiling of her dining-room and the agents were dragging their feet over fixing it. Her husband's job meant she hosted quite a lot of dinner parties and she was mortified by the stain on her ceiling. I couldn't get her to see that probably none of her guests would ever realize it was there. People do not look at ceilings in other people's homes in the normal way of things. She had frequently been in my flat and I asked her, without looking, to tell me what colour my ceiling was. She couldn't! But she still was sure everyone would notice her ceiling.

Monday Morning

I did rather too much yesterday and today I am a bit stiff, sore and tired, so here are a couple of lilies from my garden this summer.

Scanning my albums

Yesterday I finally worked out how to scan stuff into my computer!

This will be a big help as I have volumes of  old-fashioned photographs of my work. Although we now have a digital camera, there are pieces of work that have been given away and other pieces, especially things like cushions, that wore out long ago and are just not there to be rephotographed.

This is a page from one of my albums. The top picture is the wedding sampler I worked for myself in 1981 when we were married. It was an American kit which I bought on a trip to Tokyo from northern Japan where we were living at the time. I altered my husband's hair colour to a more natural shade and added a lace collar I had bought to the bridal dress.

 The other picture was another American kit, 'A home should be clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy'. I think this was my rebellion against the influence of my mother-in-law, who believed that a kitchen floor should be scrubbed three times daily and that a vacuum cleaner didn't do nearly as good a job as a brush and pan used on one's knees!



Discworld

This is a cross stitch design by Julia Froggatt of Lyndisfarne Designs. It is some years since I worked it as my eyesight is no longer up to working charted designs.

For those who can't work out what it is I must explain that it is the Discworld from Terry Pratchett's numerous Discworld books. I have been a keen reader of these since the very early days. They take place on a flat world which rests on four elephants which themselves rest on a turtle which swims through space.

Those who enjoy the books always enjoy the cross stitch picture which hangs in my hall. Everyone else is completely bemused.

My Second Quilt

My second quilt, started in my teens, was, though I didn't know it at the time, a seriously major undertaking, and kept me at it through my last days at school, my University days and my first years living and working in Japan.

This was a design, a special offer, in Good Housekeeping, some time in the early 1970s. You sent off for a pack of transfers and a list of thread colours and stitches. It was described as a French Potager Garden, with beds of vegetables, herbs and flowers surrounding a lily pond in the centre. It still strikes me as unusual and attractive, but I do wonder how many other people ever managed to finish it!

Actually I found it quite convenient as I could put one piece of fabric with the design transferred onto it, the threads for that piece and a small pair of scissors into a very small box, so it was a very portable project. I should add that this was before I knew about embroidery hoops. I was working from one of those little booklets, probably produced by Coates, which showed basic instructions for the most common embroidery stitches, that being all we had at home on the subject apart from Mary Thomas' book.

At University I was very lonely since I was both studying a very obscure subject, at that time there were only 4 of us in the year studying Japanese, and I was from Northern wilds that I don't think many other students had ever heard of. I overheard one girl say to another, "Oh, but she's from The North, Coventry, you know".  As someone who had always thought of Coventry as 'way down south' I kept extremely quiet! My little box of sewing helped me endure between-lectures breaks in the junior common room.

And it went with me when I went to Japan to a home-stay with a Japanese family and a 6 week summer school there. This family had been told such strange and alarming things about foreigners by the school (that we would not be willing to eat Japanese food or use chopsticks, and that we would expect steak for breakfast) that they were terrified of my arrival. The fact that I am only 5ft 2inches helped a bit as they were expecting some sort of giant, but what really broke the ice was when I brought out my bit of embroidery. The mother of the family was a keen embroiderer herself and if I embroidered I must be human!

I took it with me when, after University, I went to Japan to teach English in a remote northern town where a foreigner with blonde hair walking down the street was apt to have the sort of effect an escaped lion would have. If I wanted to buy anything in a shop I had to speak very quickly, before the shopkeeper got a proper look at me, or they would escape out of the back of the shop at a run!

Naturally, my skills improved as I worked so there is quite a noticable difference between the earlier and the later blocks. But eventually I got them all finished and stitched down onto a piece of green cotton. I was very proud of myself for getting it finished even if it had taken some years!