Welcome to Knitkatpaddywhack!

by Kat

Knitted spheres

Hello Friends,

Welcome to Knitkatpaddywhack! Let me tell you a little bit about it, and about myself. This is sort of a new blog, but also, my posts go back as far as 2011! Knitkatpaddywhack is the second generation of my first blog, which was called The Knitted Kitten, and my old posts from The Knitted Kitten have migrated with me to Knitkatpaddywhack.

 

What This Blog is About

This blog is a place for me to share knitting information, techniques, tutorials, and patterns, with all of you. There are also the odd posts about spinning (like this one and this one), crochet, and other yarn crafts (like dyeing yarn). And there are a few posts (like this one from Paris and this one from England) about when I travelled around Europe chancing upon knitting stuff everywhere, and miscellany like that. I actually have another post which you can read here which outlines in more detail what you can expect from Knitkatpaddywhack.

I want to start a conversation with you about knitting and other fibre arts. Fibre artists could easily become a dying breed, lost in a techy world. Yet, there is vibrancy in the handcrafts, and I want in. Do you? Well actually, I am in, and have been since 2010 when I picked up a few how-to-knit books from my local library. My needles have scarcely stopped moving since, and now I design patterns too and would be honoured to have others knit and enjoy them. Please check out a few of my patterns which I posted previously, like the Angelfish Beanie, the Lily Earflap Hat, and the Knitted Sphere Tutorial. I have many more waiting in the wings to be edited and published for you to enjoy.

Please also join me on Ravelry, Pinterest, and Facebook.

What would you like to see on this blog? Let me know in the comments below!

That’s all from me. Peace,

Kat

Kat

This post was posted in Knitting

About This Blog

by Kat

Kat, the blogger, knitting.

Dear Friends,

I wanted to write you an honest letter about this blog, what I am trying to achieve with it, and what I am getting out of it (financially and otherwise).

About This Blog

This blog, Knitkatpaddywhack (formerly The Knitted Kitten) was started by me, Kat, in 2011, as a “for fun” blog about knitting. Knitting is one of my great passions. From it has grown other passions of spinning yarn and designing knitting patterns. Another of my passions is writing, so writing about knitting was and is a lot of fun for me. Much has changed since 2011. I finished my first degree, went overseas a few times, moved state, finished my second degree, started work as a psychologist, got married, and had a baby. It was while I was staying at home with my baby daughter that I started to think about this blog (which I had been neglecting since my daughter was born), and what it means to me. When you have a whole, spectacular, tiny person who is learning from everything you’re doing, and to whom you are the most influential person on earth, you start to think about what you can show for your life, what you can be for her.

My Vision for This Blog

This blog is a place where I can be the fearless creative person I hope my daughter will be one day. I originally made this blog to share my knitting adventures, and largely, it will remain that way. Many of my posts will be personal or esoteric. You know, not the kind of thing you might find on a polished, “professional” blog. But, I love them. When I moved my posts over from The Knitted Kitten, I re-read them. I was endeared by 21, 22, 23-year-old Kat who wrote about random spinning groups she finds on Swedish mountaintops, or devoted a whole post and a half to memorialising her rabbit whose hair she had spun into yarn not that long before he died. This blog will still have that. I want this blog to be a conversation with the people who read it. I want you to share your random life events in the comments as well.

But I want to push this blog further, too. I see this blog as a place where I can make a collection of my own knitting patterns, some for sale, some for free. I would love to see my patterns in knitting magazines and books one day. This blog will also be a place of education, about sharing knitting techniques, ideas, and hacks. BUT, what I am not planning to do is reinvent the wheel. There are so many wonderful resources about knitting online and in libraries already, many of which have and still are helping me in my mostly self-taught knitting journey. I see no need to explain how to cast on because many many great bloggers have done that before me. What I will do is add my own knowledge, my own spin on things, and share tricks that I believe are little-known and worth sharing.

Financial Aspects

I have also decided to monetise this blog in ways other than selling patterns. This might include recommending affiliate products. This is where I recommend products to you which, if you buy them using links I have included, I will receive a commission from the companies who sell them to you (any post that contains affiliate links will clearly state that fact). I thought long and hard about whether and how to do this in a way which is in line with my ethical beliefs. I was concerned about becoming a person who tries to sell things to readers for no reason other than my own gain, and I didn’t want to be that person. Here is what I promise you:

  • I will only recommend products to you that I believe are useful (I won’t try to get you to buy something simply for my gain). Think of me as a friend recommending products that I think you’ll like and will help you.
  • I will endeavour to recommend products which I have personally used and love. At the very least, I will recommend products which are from trusted brands with good reviews, and ideally very similar to exact products I have used.
  • I will not invent hype or make you feel like something is a “must-have” item. Almost nothing is a “must-have” item. If I love an item, I will tell you, but I won’t deliberately put you under unnecessary pressure to buy it.

So this is what Knitkatpaddywhack is about. It is about sharing knitting and life tid-bits, sharing creativity, and especially sharing knowledge, and I feel that the only way I can be comfortable making any amount of money from this blog is by being ethical about doing so. Thank you, friends, for visiting this blog, and supporting this blog as you have been. Even if this is the first time ever that you have visited Knitkatpaddywhack, thank you! It means a lot, really.

Peace,

Kat

Kat

This post was posted in Thoughts

Wise Baby Sun Hat Pattern – PS I had a baby!

by Kat

Wise Baby Sun Hat Image

Hi friends,

Sorry for the long long gap between posts, but I was busy having a baby. On November 14, 2016, at 9:16pm, I gave birth to a healthy 4.09kg (9lb) baby girl. Let’s call her Peanut. That’s not her name, but let’s call her that. She is now 7 months old, beautiful, chubby, tall, and a delightful handful. When she was five weeks old she was baptised and wore the gown (link) I made her, which thankfully fit, because my goodness that baby grew quickly. I haven’t had a heap of time for knitting or blogging, but I’m hoping to get back into it, and what better way for a new mum to do that than post a new pattern for a baby hat!

Wise Baby Sun Hat image with props

When Peanut was born, we had plenty of beanies that fit her, but no sun hats, and when she was born, summer was just around the corner. So, I designed and made one for her. Before the pattern, a couple of notes:

  • The hat in the photos is the one I made for my daughter. When I had finished it, I decided it was a little too shallow, so in the pattern I added a few extra stocking stitch rows above the butterfly stitch, so when you knit it, it will be a bit deeper in the head than the image.

Without further ado, here it is. I hope you enjoy the Wise Baby Sun Hat!

Wise Baby Sun Hat image

Wise Baby Sun Hat

Download the PDF here: Wise Baby Sun Hat

Yarn: Moda Vera Gelato (or any 4ply smooth cotton yarn), held double (MC=pink, CC=red)

Needles: Size 10 (3.25mm) straight needles.

Tension: 10cm = 18 stitches x 28 rows in stocking stitch.

To fit: 0-3mo approx.

This hat is worked flat and bottom up.

Glossary of Terms

k: knit

P: purl

St/sts: stitch/stitches

K2tog: knit 2 stitches together

Wyif: with yarn in front

Wyib: with yarn in back

Yif: yarn in front

Yib: yarn in back

Make butterfly: With right hand needle, pick up the five floats by inserting the needle under the floats from the bottom up, then knit the next stitch on the left hand needle.

Brim

Using MC, cast on 128sts. Work in garter stitch for 15 rows.

Next row (WS): [K2tog] to end. 64 sts.

Start of band

Work 4 rows in stocking stitch, starting with a P row.

Butterfly stitch panel

Change to CC.

Rows 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13 (WS): P all sts.

Rows 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10: [k1, yip, s5, yib, k2] to last st, k1.

Row 12: [k4, make butterfly, k4] to last st, k1.

End of band

Change to MC. Work 8 rows in stocking stitch.

Decrease for crown

Row 1: [K6, k2tog] to end. 56 sts

Row 2 and all even-numbered rows: P all sts.

Row 3: [K5, k2tog] to end. 48 sts.

Row 5: [K4, K2tog] to end. 40 sts.

Row 7: [K3, K2tog] to end. 32 sts.

Row 9: [K2, k2tog] to end. 24 sts.

Row 11: [K1, K2tog] to end 16 sts.

Row 13: [K2tog} to end. 8 sts.

Cut yarn, leaving a 60cm tail. Thread yarn through the 8 remaining live stitches. Pull tightly. Sew up seam and weave in ends. Block or steam.

Kat

This post was posted in Pattern

Modifying a Knitting Pattern: Five Ideas as Demonstrated by my Baby’s Baptism Gown

by Kat

 

 
I made our baby’s baptism gown a few months ago now, before we went overseas for two months. I also made a bonnet in the event that the baby is a girl (we don’t know yet). My baby’s due date is in two and a half weeks, but now that I’ve washed all the sheets and cloth nappies, he or she is allowed to be born any time. Whether baby is early or not, the baptism date is already booked for just before Christmas. The gown is based on someone else’s pattern, for a cardigan in fact. I modify patterns all the time. It’s not hard and in fact the second ever thing I made which wasn’t rectangular was a teddy bear, which used a pattern modified from one designed by the legendary Jean Greenhowe. I’d like to share five pattern-modifying ideas with you, as demonstrated by my baby’s baptism gown. My “how-to” descriptions are relevant to top-down or bottom-up patterns, but just replace “row” with “stitch” or vice versa for a sideways pattern and you’re pretty much set. But first, some background.
 

Some Background

The pattern I based the gown on was this one, a baby cardigan by Patons Australia. It calls for 4ply yarn. The yarn I used was the leftovers from my wedding dress, which was a 2ply mercerised cotton, so I did a tension swatch and selected the right needles to get the correct tension (see my post about tension here). It’s a good idea to keep your tension swatch when you’re planning on modifying a pattern, especially if you’re planning to add length or width. After that, I was ready to rock and roll. Here are five ideas I used to modify the cardigan pattern to make the baptism gown.
 

1: Add Length

I added a lot of length to this cardigan pattern to make the gown, as I wanted one that went beyond baby’s feet. This is one of the simplest modifications you can make, particularly if a pattern involves sections of a plain stitch like garter or stocking stitch. You might like to try it to lengthen a short-looking jumper, to turn anklet socks into full-length ones, or to add length to the sleeves of a garment.

How to do it:

Remember that tension swatch you saved? Good. You now know how many rows it takes you to knit a centimetre, or an inch, or whatever unit of measurement you want to use. So, let’s say the original pattern is 20cm long, but you want something which is 40cm long. Therefore, you need to add 20cm of length to it. By looking at your tension swatch, you know it takes 15 rows to make 10cm, and therefore 30 rows to make 20cm. So, you just knit 30 more rows. Ideally, add these rows in an area without shaping and where there is a simple stitch pattern being used, like stocking or garter. If that’s not an option, like if the pattern is made up of a repeating lace pattern, then make sure you are finishing the pattern on the same row as given in the pattern, or else when you get to another section like a decrease for the yoke of a jumper, you may find that you have thrown out the lace pattern. For example, if you are adding length in an area with a lace pattern which is 6 rows long, and the original pattern wants you to end on a row 5 of the lace pattern before decreases start, make sure you end on a row 5.
 

2: Add Width

I added width to my baby’s gown because the pattern was originally for a cardigan, I.e. only the top half of a person, which does not include kicky baby legs. And if I know anything about this baby before s/he is born, this baby is pretty kicky.

How to do it:

Basically the same as adding width, but think stitches rather than rows. For example, say you want to add 5cm of width, and your 10X10cm tension swatch is 22 stitches across. 10cm divided by 2 is 5cm (what you’re after), and 22 stitches divided by 2 is 11 stitches, so you’d add 11 stitches. Add these evenly around a garment, unless for some reason you specifically want the front half to be wider than the back or vice versa. As with the baptism gown, if your piece has a repeating pattern (in the gown’s case, a lace feature near the bottom), it is easiest to make sure the number of stitches you increase by is a multiple of the number of stitches used in the repeating pattern. So, taking our 5cm increase example, if there’s a lace border that is 6 stitches wide for each repeat, it is easiest to add 12 stitches. That way you avoid the confusion of having an incomplete pattern repeat.
With the baptism gown, I made it wider for the bottom part of the gown, but back to the original pattern’s specifications for the underarms upwards (it was a bottom-up pattern). When I got to where I wanted to go back to the original pattern’s numbers, I simply decreased by the appropriate number of stitches. This is best done on a row with a plain stitch which doesn’t have any other required shaping.
 

3: Add More Buttons

 

Or add any buttons. I of course needed to do this as I was turning this cardigan into a long gown. You might want to do it if a pattern has no buttons where you want some, when a pattern doesn’t have enough buttons for your preference, or as in my case if you are significantly lengthening your garment so need to add more buttons.

How to do it:

If your pattern already has buttons, work your added buttonholes in the same way the buttonholes are worked for the original pattern, and space them the same distance apart as the buttons in the original pattern. If the original pattern only has one button, choose an appropriate distance between buttonholes. You can use your tension swatch to help you figure out how many rows are needed between each buttonhole given how far apart you want them to be.
If you are adding buttons where the pattern originally had none, you have several choices for how to add them in. This article shows several methods of working a buttonhole.
Once you have finished your piece with your added buttonholes, simply sew buttons to the corresponding spot on the opposite side to the garment.
 

4: Add a Feature

 

You can make a piece your own by adding a design feature. I added an eyelet row on the baptism gown just under the underarms, through which I threaded a white satin ribbon. This feature is not just decorative in this case. Since the baby hasn’t been born yet, I don’t know how big s/he will be, let alone how big s/he’ll be at a month old when the baby is baptised, so if it’s a small baby I can draw the ribbon tighter. I also wanted to make a gown that could potentially be worn by the baby’s future siblings, who, I’m assuming, will vary in size.
As a side note, my not knowing the size of the baby is one reason why I decided to make a gown with a completely open front. If we end up with a whopper who can’t fit in the gown done up, it can be like a baptism coat. Also, while I’m hoping for a smallish baby, both my husband and I were large (my baby record book says I had “macrosomia” = big body), and we both come from families with a pattern of legendarily big babies, so a whopper is a real possibility.

How to do it:

This really depends on what you want to add. Some ideas for things to add, aside from an eyelet round for a ribbon, could be:
  • A lace/cable/fancy pattern motif, maybe a panel down the front of a pullover.
  • An intarsia design, like a star or a love heart on a child’s top.
  • Some beading. See here and here for two ways to add beads to your knitting.
My advice for adding a feature would be to aim to add it in an area where there is minimal and ideally no shaping, just to make things simpler for you.
 

5: Expand on an Existing Feature

 

This can be a really easy way to add some apparent intricacy to a knitted piece. The cardigan pattern I based the baptism gown on had a simple repeating lace diamond design running along the bottom edge, on either side of the middle next to the buttons/buttonholes, and running down each sleeve. Instead of having one set of lace diamonds running along the bottom edge of the piece, I simply added another set of diamonds. This added a little more interest to the gown.

How to do it:

This depends on what feature you want to expand on. In most cases, it will simply be a case of working more rows of the feature you’re expanding on. If you want the overall length of the garment to be the same as the pattern, you will need to take into account that by adding rows to a feature, you will need to subtract that number of rows somewhere else to compensate.
 
There you have it; five ideas to modify a knitting pattern. Let me know if you have any other ideas. I’d love to hear about them!
 
Peace,
The Knitted Kitten

Kat

This post was posted in Tutorial

My Hand-Knitted Wedding Gown: Part 4 of 4

by Kat
Look at this resplendent, elegant, figure-amplifying (in a good way) wedding gown, made with love by the bride in her spare time at work in enough secrecy that the groom didn’t find out it was handmade until the priest announced it in his homily.
And making it was a complete joy from start to finish, the process was smooth, and it is exactly, perfectly, how I imagined it to be, only better.
Just kidding, almost nothing is like that.
Granted, my wedding dress was quite enjoyable to design and knit and had surprisingly few hiccups, but this post is here to tell you about the whole process of knitting the dress – what was easy AND what was hard.
This will be my final post on my wedding dress, and at the end of this post, I’ll tell you about an exciting new project I have planned for the future.

My Knitting Process

I just wanted to touch on my knitting process when the item I’m making is something I’ve designed myself. If you are a fan of Ravelry (of course you are), you’ll sometimes see a pattern where the designer says something like “I wrote this pattern as I went along”. Other knitters, I’m sure, will write the whole pattern out and then knit it, adjusting as they go. I’m more often the second one, but with my wedding dress, it was a bit of both. I took my measurements and figured out how many pattern repeats were required for each part of the dress. Then I decided on a section to knit (I did the sleeves first), wrote a pattern for that section, then knitted it. For the dress, I wrote the pattern for the top until the waist, then knitted it, then wrote the pattern from the waist until the knees and knitted that, etc. It worked well doing it this way and allowed me to think a few things over before committing them to paper. For example, at first I was going to make the dress very fitted until the knees and then flare it out, but as I knitted the parts above that, I changed my mind and decided to make the dress less fitted from a bit above the knees to make sure I could walk in the dress. This worked really well, and I was surprised I wasn’t ripping up rounds and rounds of stitches because of mistakes I’d made. That only happened near the end.

Stuff that Didn’t Go to Plan

So most of the dress was actually a breeze. There are probably some little glitches in the pattern here and there but I don’t remember them, and people certainly didn’t notice them on the day. Paying attention to detail is great, but it’s also a load off to know that people aren’t going to be standing there examining your wedding dress with a magnifying glass. Mostly they were just like “Wow, you made that?!”, and I don’t know how many times I answered the question of how long it took me to make it. But let’s talk about stuff that didn’t work.
First of all, when I got to the short row shaping to make the train, I ran into a small glitch in that the pattern I was using was a mesh pattern. In short row shaping, you usually add a stitch on each row (when you’re making something bigger — the opposite for making something smaller). Because the mesh pattern involved yos, k2togs, and the odd k1 to even out the pattern, sometimes when I added a stitch, I would end up with an extra stitch that was missing its pair for a k2tog, or three stitches in a row without a yo, but if I added a yo, it would mess up the stitch count. This, in practice, was fine, because by looking at the pattern, and knowing what I was trying to achieve, I could adjust the pattern as I went. To write it down as I went along, though, it got confusing.
This next challenge was the biggest one. I had picked out a lace edging pattern worked sideways, which I was going to use for the front bottom edge of the dress and for the bad which would go round my shoulders and attach the sleeves to the dress. I added it to the bottom of the dress – fine. Then I made a band a metre wide, as that was my round-the-shoulder measurement. It seemed pretty saggy but I thought, I’d better trust my measuring, and I had measured more than once. So once all the elements of the dress were knitted, I went to the house of one of my bridesmaids (who at the time was about two days off her own wedding)and she pinned me into the dress so I knew where to attach the sleeves. She also pinned the shoulder band to the sleeves and the dress. And it was SO SAGGY. It was simply not going to work. So, what to do? I was over 8 weeks away from my wedding, so I had time to work things out, but still, it made me a little nervy. I thought about folding the band over at the edges to make it shorter, but I realised part of the issue was that it was knitted sideways and had too much stretch. I bought a couple of lengths of ready-made lace and thought about using one of them to the dress. I even sewed a stretchy bit of lace to the shoulder band in an attempt to make it work, but it was bunchy and made it look makeshift. In the end, my solution was to use a couple of methods to solve the problem. I ditched the sideways shoulder band. Instead, I picked up and knitted stitches around the sleeves and the dress, having sewn the sleeves to the dress at the underarms. I worked up a little way in stocking stitch and then worked a peacock-style edging. This gave me the scalloped top of the dress that I wanted. It was less saggy than the original band, that’s for sure, but it wasn’t staying up on its own either. So I sewed in four strands of clear elastic (the kind you use for beading) and this fixed the problem! The scallops were a bit floppy but in the end I liked it that way. I have never used knitting-in elastic, but this might have been a good situation to use it. This issue also made the “how long did it take you to make?” question hard to answer. Umm, four months to make 99% of it and then 6 weeks of fiddling and procrastinating to make the last 1%?

Would I Do it Again?

In a heartbeat, yes. These issues I just outlined were tiny compared with the joy I got from making the dress. To be able to knit something from a piece of string is empowering. To design said object, and for your wedding, no less? That’s like being the queen of the world wearing a fluffy purple robe, on your throne, with a tabby kitten on your lap, while you eat a piece of chocolate cake. That good.
It was a lovely secret to keep, too. I didn’t tell my husband about my dress, which was fun because he really wanted to know. He knew it had sleeves and it was white, and he roughly knew how much it cost. I told a few people along the way, the first being my sister. The next were a couple of friends whose sewing machine I borrowed to alter the strapless dress I wore underneath. I told a couple of my husband’s female relatives and apparently by the time the wedding came round, all the female relatives knew. And of course, my bridesmaids knew. A while before I told them, one of them had jokingly sent me a picture of a funny knitted wedding dress, not at all expecting me to be making my own.
By designing my dress, I could make it my own. I could make it with sleeves. I have a nasty habit of being turned off things that everyone seems to do, like straightening your hair or watching Game of Thrones or being cool, and I had seen far too many strapless, sleeveless wedding dresses for me to want one. It’s funny, just a couple of weeks ago I was talking to a couple of friends, both of whom had been brides themselves. The first bought her dress off Etsy, the second wore a blue dress bought from a costume website, and both of them said they went with those unusual wedding dress purchasing boutiques because they wanted dresses with sleeves. Make more wedding dresses with sleeves, clothes people!
My dress was well cheaper than your average wedding dress, it fitted every curve of me, I didn’t need to dry clean it, it looked great, and I felt fabulous wearing it. And it wasn’t that hard. What’s there not to like?
Well, there is one final issue with my dress that I’d better mention.

Kat

This post was posted in Design

My Hand-Knitted Wedding Gown: Part 3

by Kat

I’m back! Sorry for neglecting you for the past few months. When your husband plans your European holiday, turns out you don’t see as many spinning wheels or embroidery. But here I am again, back in Australia, back telling you about my knitted wedding dress.

This is part 3 of my posts about designing and knitting my wedding dress. My previous posts on the topic can be found here and here. I’m going to be referring a lot to the lace stitch patterns which I mentioned in my second wedding dress post.
Designing a new knitted project can seem daunting. Really though, it’s not that hard. Believe me? Maybe not, but I’m telling the truth, and here’s my secret: I am lazy. I wash my clothes in cold water primarily because it means I don’t have to separate them. I eat the same pre-packaged breakfast food everyday in the car on the way to work because it means I don’t have to make a decision. I wasn’t going to get stressed by designing a complicated wedding dress.
Being original is great, and there’s an elaborate way to do it and a lazy girl way to do it. And for my wedding dress in particular, well, we set the date of the wedding to be 8 months after the engagement, so I didn’t have time to design something complicated. So here it is; how I designed my wedding dress based on existing stitch patterns (lazy, remember)and made a wedding dress I was thrilled to wear down the aisle with no frantic rushing to get it finished.
First Step: Gather Your Supplies
Before I had a pattern at all, I selected a yarn to use. I had an idea of the dress in my head already, so I knew what kind of yarn would be good. It had to have a sheen to it and not be woolly. It had to be fine because I wanted an open-work knitted gown. Because I’m a vegetarian (and also cheap), I didn’t want it to be silk. That actually leaves you with lots of choices: mercerised cotton, bamboo, certain kinds of acrylic. In the end, I selected a 2 ply mercerised cotton thread called Satin, by Milford, in white.
 
To find the right needles, I began by swatching, trying out stitch patterns with different sized needles with the yarn I had selected. As you might have read in my last post, I had sneakily started planning this gown before we were officially engaged, so I actually started swatching six weeks or so before there was a ring on my finger. My now-husband (who had no idea about the wedding dress until the wedding day) saw the swatches on my couch a couple of times and asked me what I was doing. “Just playing around with stitch patterns,” I’d said, “I might make a skirt or something”. Kind of true. I did make an “or something”. I started with biggish needles, in the region of 4.5mm (bigger needles mean faster knitting mean less work), but that compromised the definition of the leaves in the main pattern I used. The swatch I liked the best used 3.75mm needles, so in the end that’s what I went with.
Yarn and needles selected (and official engagement in the past), I then had the task of fitting the stitch patterns to a pattern.
 
Making the Pattern
My last post gave a bit of an overall description of my gown, but in short; it was an off-the-shoulder dress with full length sleeves and a short train. It was made of five separate pieces:
  • Left sleeve: worked bottom up
  • Right sleeve: worked bottom up
  • Dress: worked top down
  • Bottom front trim of dress: worked sideways and knitted as I went to the bottom of the dress.
  • Shoulder strap (worked by picking up stitches from the sleeves and the dress): Worked bottom up.
Diagrams were very useful in helping me place all my measurements

 

 
To go into the finer details of the whole gown’s construction would be a monster post, but here are the basics for me making a pattern for the sleeves and the dress.
 
Step 1: Take Measurements.
I took measurements around various points in my body and also measured the distance between each measurement. So for each arm, the measurements I took were:
  • Wrist circumference
  • Arm circumference around elbow
  • Distance between wrist and elbow
  • Arm circumference at armpit
  • Distance between elbow and armpit.
For the dress, the measurements I took were:
  • Body circumference at armpits
  • Bust circumference (widest point)
  • Distance between armpit and bust
  • Circumference just under the bust
  • Distance between bust and just under it
  • Waist circumference (narrowest point)
  • Distance between waist and just under bust
  • Hip circumference (widest point)
  • Distance between hip and waist
  • Knee circumference
  • Distance between knee and the floor
 
Let’s now take the sleeves as an example of how I calculated stitch numbers for a pattern. I applied basically the same principle to the dress, except for the dress was partly knitted in the round with eyelets on either side for lacing up, and the rest knitted in the round. The sleeves were just knitted flat, so it’s easier to explain.
 
The stitch pattern I used (Willow Leaves – see my most recent wedding dress post) had a very convenient tension. One pattern repeat was 10cm stitch-wise and 5.5cm row-wise, and it was 16sts across. Let’s split up my working into length and width.
 
Length:
I determined that my arms were 50cm long (wrist-elbow = 23cm, elbow-armpit = 27cm). That meant I needed 50cm worth of rows, and to make things simpler, I rounded it to a whole number of pattern repeats, and so worked 9 repeats (9 X 5.5 = 49.5cm). I did 4 repeats from wrist to elbow, and 5 from elbow to armpit. This becomes relevant when we start looking at width.
 
Width:
My width measurements were as follows:
Wrist: 14 cm (=1.5 repeats)
Elbow: 24cm (=2.5 repeats)
Arm at armpit: 28cm (=3 repeats)
 
So, between the wrist and the elbow, I cast on enough for 1.5 repeats (stitch-wise), and as I knitted, increased (by half a repeat at a time) the number of stitches so that by the time I got to the elbow, I had 2.5 repeats stitch-wise. Then I followed the same process from the elbow to the armpit. To simplify things, I only increased stitches by half a repeat or one repeat at a time, and only did so once a full row-wise repeat had been completed. I didn’t do anything fancy to make the increases flow on from the previous bits of the pattern. Had I more time to design, I might have, but for a wedding dress, it’s the big picture that’s going to get noticed and I don’t think my dress suffered for not making sure the pattern flowed perfectly throughout.
 
I worked the rest of the dress more or less as I did with for the sleeves, but with more additions. From the top of the dress until the hips, I worked it flat, adding in a garter stitch border with eyelets. I did this so I could deliberately make the dress too small so that when tightened with a ribbon, it would fit perfectly. This was both because I was losing weight and because knitted items do stretch.
 
From the hips to just above the knees, I knitted the dress in the round and quite fitted to my shape. Where the eyelets had been, I knitted a simple mesh panel. From just above the knees, I flared the dress out, firstly using pi shaping, and then when the number of stitches got too large to manageably do that, by increasing the number of stitches by a third. Where the dress hit the floor, I separated the front and the back. For the front, I knitted the Grandmother’s Lace Edging (see my last post), attaching it to the dress by knitting the last stitch of each right side row with a live stitch from the skirt. For the back of the dress, I used short row shaping to make a short train (a semi-circle with the back of the skirt being its diameter), not in the Willow Leaves pattern but in the simple mesh pattern I had running down the back of my dress. I edged this with the Willow Leaf edging from the Heliotaxis shawl. When that was all done, there was some fiddling around to find a stitch pattern that would work for the strap which went round my shoulders (I tried the Grandmother’s Lace edging at first but it didn’t work out), but once I found one which worked, I sewed the sleeves to the top of the dress, picked up stitches around the body and shoulders and knitted for a cm or two, then worked the selected stitch pattern for the shoulder strap.
 
And there you have it: My pattern design process, in brief. In my next post I’ll talk about how I went about my process of actually knitting the dress.
 
Now, did that sound too complicated? Maybe but it really wasn’t. If you can measure, add, and multiply, you can design a wedding dress. See, school maths does come in handy.

Kat

This post was posted in Design

My Hand-Knitted Wedding Gown: Hiatus

by Kat

I’m sure you’ve all been wetting your pants waiting for the next instalment of how I made my wedding dress. Thus, I’m here to disappoint. Only temporarily, I promise. You see, I’ve gone to Europe for a part pilgrimage/part second honeymoon, and I’ll be away for a couple of months. That means all my notes on my wedding dress are on another continent so I won’t be able to blog about my dress until I get back 🙁 . However, for those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that when I took a different trip to Europe four years ago, I found plenty of textile-related things to blog about, so stay tuned for blog posts about random tapestries and knitting shops in Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Germany, Austria, France, the UK, and Ireland. Peace and God bless,

The Knitted Kitten

Kat

This post was posted in Design

My Hand-Knitted Wedding Gown: Part 2

by Kat

A year ago today, he took me to the top of a mountain and gave me a ring. He made one request: that I be his wife. I said yes. And sometime after that I started planning what my wedding dress would look like.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I might have already bought the inside layer of the dress over a month before we got engaged. In my defence, we had already decided to get married long before the official engagement. And I was going away for a month and the dress was on sale!

 

So I was only a little bit jumping the gun. Oh, and I’d started swatching lace patterns for my dress. Only a little bit crazy, I swear.

 

Well, that’s not entirely true. I might have designed my wedding dress long before I met my husband. I’ve always wanted to get married. I even designed my school formal dress (two years in advance, when I was 15) to be a poufy ball gown because I knew I wanted a slinky gown for my wedding (but ball gowns also rock). When I was 18 or so, I came to a deeper desire to engage with my Catholic faith, which got me thinking about this thing called vocation; the path of holiness God calls you to. After a time, I became sure once again that yes, marriage is my vocation. It’s for life, not just for a day, like a puppy (but also more spiritual than a puppy). That said, when I started to get ready as a single person for marriage and being a wife one day, that was when I REALLY started to daydream about my wedding day, as a momentous occasion to represent my commitment to another person. It’s more than just a chance to be a princess, which I also enjoy. That’s when I started sketching my wedding dress. For years, I had a drawing of a wedding dress in my bible which I drew when I was about 19. I carried that bible down the aisle on my wedding day and I’ve just flipped through all the pages now and I can’t find that drawing, otherwise I’d have shown it to you.

 

Okay so maybe I’m a little wedding crazy.
But let’s ignore the fact that I had my wedding dress largely planned a)before I met my husband and b)before we got engaged. Here is the first post about how I designed my wedding dress. I’ll begin with the overall design and choosing lace patterns (I’ll cover yarn and needle choice in another post).

 

 

 

Overall Design of my Gown

 

My wedding gown is composed of two pieces. The first is a strapless sweetheart fishtail ivory dress (no train). I bought this dress from www.boohoo.com with a promo code. Unfortunately I think the dress (called Mira Bella) has been discontinued, but here is a picture (and Boohoo is a pretty cool website for affordable clothes IMO):

 

 

 

As you can see, it has a peplum on it, which I had to remove, which means I had to use a sewing machine, which I am not that good at. But I did it! Yay! Cheers to my wonderful friend who let me borrow her sewing machine and was the first person after my sister to know I was knitting my wedding dress.
 

 

The second piece of my dress is of course the knitted bit: a lace off-the-shoulder gown with full-length sleeves, fishtail skirt and a small train. It has a lace-up back from the gluteus maximus upwards. From the bum down, I included a panel of mesh lace (think [k2tog, yo] with the odd K1 here and there) in the centre all the way down to the floor of the dress. I then continued this mesh pattern round the back half of the dress, using short rows to create the train, which is finished with a thick lace edging. To shape the skirt, I made it quite fitted until just above the knees, and then used pi shaping and variations of it to flare out the skirt.
My dress, minus sleeves. Gives some idea of the construction and shape.

 

Me in my dress a couple of weeks before the wedding, when one of my stellar bridesmaids helped me try it on.
 

 

Choosing Patterns to Use

 

So, I’ve had my eyes on knitting my own wedding dress since I realised how versatile knitting is and that I’m a pretty capable knitter (pretty much anybody can be – it’s not as hard as it looks). That’s why I already had a collection of nice lace shawl patterns favourited on Ravelry, and also I love lace. The more open-work, the better. I’m not sure when I decided on wanting a leaf design, nor when I favourited the Heliotaxis Lace shawl by Renata Brenner, but when I started looking through my fourites on Ravelry, it stuck out to me as the right pattern for my dress. And it’s a free pattern, too.

 

I used two of the lace charts from this shawl in order to make my dress. The first one, used for the vast bulk of the dress was called Willow Leaves. It’s a design of two strands of leaves bordered by yos and a knit stitch. Why’d I pick it?

 

  • It’s pretty.
  • It’s relatively simple.
  • It’s quite open.
  • It is a pretty ‘fluid’ looking design – not grid-like. I wanted this for my gown.
  • I thought leaves would be a cool motif.

 

Other advantages of this pattern:

 

  • As it turns out, the yarn and needles I used meant that the tension for one pattern repeat was exactly 10cm stitch-wise, which is a very handy, easy-to-multiply measurement. It was also 5.5cm row-wise, which isn’t bad.
  • Because it was quite a short pattern row-wise, it meant I could change the shape of my very fitted dress frequently, which means I never had to cut off the pattern halfway through a row.

 

As I’ll explain in a later post, I modified the pattern sometimes throughout the knitting, when I needed half a repeat stitch-wise.
Willow Leaves swatch (with funny modified bit on the right)

 

 

 

The other pattern I used from the Heliotaxis shawl was called Willow Leaves Aeolian Border and it is the same edging used in the shawl. Reasons why I chose this pattern:

 

  • The nupps add some interest because I didn’t have time to faff around with beads.
  • It ties in with the leaf motif.
  • The peaks along the edge are a pretty feature of lace knitting.

 

 

 

Me, on the wedding day, having some alone time with the Willow Leaves Aeolian Border

 

A shot of both the skirt shaping and the Aeolian Border

 

Along the front bottom of the dress I used a  pattern called Grandmother’s Edging, which was worked sideways. It has a pretty scalloped edge to it and looks kind of leafy.

Along the top of the dress (across the shoulders) I chose a Peacock tail pattern (found here). It has some sneaky elastic in it to help hold it up. I had at first wanted some nice crisp scallops but in the end I liked it how it was. That top two inches was the bit of the dress I had the most trouble with, but I will talk about that in a later post.

 

Top of the dress. PS: Head piece is also hand-knitted by me out of wire.
 

 

Next Step

 

My next step, after choosing patterns, was to measure myself and make a pattern for the dress. That’s for next time.

 

 

 

Peace,

 

 

 

The Knitted Kitten

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kat

This post was posted in Design

My Hand-Knitted Wedding Gown: Part 1

by Kat

Do you have a masterpiece? Something you’ve made that you look back on and you get a little burst of pride in knowing you made it with your own hands? Would you like one of those?


This is my current masterpiece; my wedding dress. I’ve had a few masterpieces in my knitting life (my first pair of socks, an intarsia Che Guevara cushion, my bamboo lace cardigan) but this one takes the white marzipan-encased cake. I’m sharing my process with you because I want every knitter to make her or his own masterpiece.


My next few posts will explain how, in about six months, I designed my dream dress, spent my lunch breaks knitting every wedding frustration, hope and dream into it, hid the secret from my now husband, and got an even bigger kick out of our special day by wearing something I made stitch-by-stitch. As a bonus, I think it looks pretty good too.


I invite you to visit this blog over the next few weeks to read how I made my masterpiece. What will your masterpiece be?

Kat

This post was posted in Design

How I Taught My Friend to Knit

by Kat

This is the story of how I taught my friend to knit.

In late 2014, I got a Facebook message from my friend Gabriel* with this link on it: http://www.handimania.com/knit/30-minute-infinity-scarf.html. “No needle knitting!” He said, “There’s definitely a needle surplus in the world now”. And he said he wanted to try to make an arm-knitted scarf for his sister’s Christmas present. I encouraged the idea, because knitting.

Gabriel is a friend I’d met at my university’s Catholic students’ society. He had just finished an engineering degree, liked to talk about theology to atheists, and could grow a great beard. A few of us from that churchy scene had started hanging out socially once a week at a pub quiz. One of the few times just the two of us had hung out was a couple of months earlier, when we sat in a pub and talked, because the quiz was booked out and our friends all bailed on a movie. We talked about everything, like how he wanted to learn to shear sheep (“I do too!” I’d said) and butcher sheep (ooh, me, not so much), plans for the house he had just moved into, studying, family…enough conversation to last longer than the movie would have gone for. At that time I was getting ready to finish my Masters and I told him how, when I moved back to Adelaide with my parents, I wasn’t in a rush to find a psychologist job. Maybe I’d start up a craft stall and sell knitted things alongside my dad’s vegetables.

However, in the intervening time between that conversation at the pub and Gabriel’s message about arm-knitting, I had been convinced by friends (in large part by him) to stick around in Tasmania for a while. “I’m not quite done with Tasmania,” I’d said to myself. 

I told Gabriel I’d happily go with him to select the right yarn, so a week or two later, we did just that. We went to Spotlight and found him some super-bulky maroon yarn. We chose a soft acrylic, because who wants a scratchy wool that shrinks in the wash? I also found some blue yarn so I could make a present for our friend’s son (who at that time was yet to be born). We went back to his house, and I left him on his own to follow the tutorial.

A few days later, I was on placement in a counselling office, waiting for a client to arrive, when I got a message from Gabriel with a picture of his right arm tangled in the yarn I’d helped him pick out, cast on but no rows knitted. Not knowing how to proceed, he was trapped, and I’m told it was quite a hassle for him to take the photo.
The ensuing conversation went something like this:
G: Am I doing it right?
K: It looks right but way too tight.
G: I can’t get it up my arm. My forearm is thicker than my wrist.
K: You need to start with a longer tail. Unravel it and cast on more loosely.
G: Aw
*a few minutes later, Gabriel posts another picture of his arm all wrapped up in yarn again*
K: Yay! Did you do a row?
G: Yeah, but I don’t think I’m doing this right.
K: It looks right to me.
G: I dunno…
K: Do you need help?
G: Yes please.
K: I’ll come over tomorrow night.

Actual photo of Gabriel’s arm. I did a good job on the yarn choice, no?

The next evening, after a day of placement, I got to his house, he made me a delicious dinner and I became slightly more impressed with him than I had been previously. I’m not going to lie; he was growing on me. “I’m not quite done with Tasmania” might have been code for “I’m not quite done with Tasmanians”.

He had the YouTube video all set up to play from his TV and he played it but really, it wasn’t my first time knitting so we mostly didn’t watch it. Instead, I demonstrated with some yarn I’d brought and he followed along. Eventually he got the hang of it and we sat on the couch while he arm-knitted his scarf and I knitted a shawl – or was it the baby cardigan? – I can’t remember. I even drew him a diagram about how knitting works, which I didn’t think made much sense but hey, he’s an engineer (A couple of weeks later when he’d decided to make another scarf for his sister-in-law, he said my diagram came in handy when he had to fix a mistake)!

When he was done with the knitting I showed him how to cast off and attach the ends together such that it made a Möbius strip, because he likes Möbius strips.

And then we were done. Then he made us a cup of tea and I told him about growing up as the daughter of aquarium enthusiasts and I drew him a diagram of an axolotl.

Then I had finished drawing pictures, so he made us a cup of tea and he showed me videos about Möbius strips and Klein bottles and physics.

Then that was done so he made us a cup of tea and we talked about theology and the monastery in the country we were both going to visit the next day.

And then it was 11pm and he had to get ready for his work which started at midnight. And so, he made us a cup of tea and he got dressed for work and then we talked until he had to leave for work and we both left.

And that is the story of how I taught my husband to knit.

Postscript: That baby, who was the recipient of the cardigan I mentioned? He’s our godson.

*Gabriel’s name is not actually Gabriel. The first time I saw him across the room and I didn’t know his name, I decided he looked like a Gabriel because his long blond hair reminded me of a cartoon Archangel Gabriel in a Christmas movie I watched as a kid.

Kat

This post was posted in Thoughts