The black dog is back

Last week’s beautiful weather seems to have gone for good; instead, it’s cool and intermittently chucking it down with rain and even hail. Sadly, my wonderful golden happy mood seems to have vanished with the sunshine and warm weather and instead my mood has been fluctuating between twitchy and anxious, irritable and downright miserable.

Cardigan – Cinnamon Girl
Dress – M&S
Shoes – Clarks

I really hope we get some more nice weather soon, and that somehow it manages to have enough of an effect to last more than a few days. Having a brain that only functions properly in warm sunny weather is something of a disadvantage living in the UK!

On the subject of depression, I would recommend this post from Hyperbole and a Half (and its predecessor) to anyone who wants to understand how depression feels, because it totally nails it. Particularly the bit about the fish.

Anyway, things are not as bad now as they were a month or so ago, even if it may feel worse because I was so much better so recently. And maybe this is just a blip and I’ll feel better in a couple of days; sometimes half the problem is just the fear of falling all the way back down again, even when I’m still not very far down at all.

Fair Isle weekend

I haven’t had a chance to do any sewing this weekend, as I’ve spent most of the two days at a Fair Isle workshop run by Susan Crawford at Darn It and Stitch. I’d signed up like a shot when this was announced, as I’ve been wanting to improve my Fair Isle skills and having taken a finishing class with Susan a few years ago I knew that she was a really good teacher and I was likely to get a lot out of the workshop.

I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Inevitably, there was a wide range of skill levels between the nine of us who’d signed up; some people were completely unfamiliar with working in the round, and while there was another continental knitter there I was the only person already familiar with both continental and English-style knitting, which gave me an advantage when it came to working two-handed. (Talking to the others there, I have come to the conclusion that I’m just an experimental sort of a knitter; some people are happy to find a way of doing things and stick to it, whereas my reaction to hearing about a different method is to think that I’ll give that a try, in case it turns out to be better than the one I was using. Which is how I started off as a standard English-style knitter and am currently a continental combination knitter.)

We spent the first day talking about how to hold the yarn, casting on and working a flat swatch (which I found interesting, as I’m not sure I would have dared to attempt colourwork with purl rows before!) and then choosing main and peerie patterns and working out colour selections for the larger sample we were working on today. (I took the opportunity to use up some of my sock yarn leftovers!)

At 11am today I had a little bit of ribbing; by 4pm I’d knitted this much:

The course also covered steeking, although there wasn’t quite time for everyone to try it (I haven’t steeked mine yet, as I want to finish the second repeat of my peerie pattern and make it symmetrical first) so Susan demonstrated on one person’s swatch:

I suspect I won’t get round to steeking my sample until next weekend, but I think I’ll be able to remember until I get to put it into practice!

I really enjoyed having the chance to play with colours. I love colour, and someone actually told me last week that I was the most colourful person they knew, but Fair Isle is colourful even by my standards, and I was a bit worried that my combination of yellowy-orange, bright blue, bright pink and pale pink would end up looking like an explosion in a paint factory, even with a dark grey to tone it down. I needn’t have worried, I really liked the way it looks!

Now I really want to try a proper Fair Isle project, though I don’t know what and I really do have enough things on the needles for now!

Trousers!

I was surprised that only one person commented that they’d never seen me wearing trousers before today, but then I suppose I was sitting behind a desk most of the time. I’m rather liking these, anyway.

Cardigan – February Lady
Blouse – charity shop
Trousers – Monsoon
Shoes – Jones Bootmaker

Also, I didn’t sign up for Me-Made May because I thought I probably didn’t have enough me-made work-appropriate clothes, but I’ve been playing along anyway and am quite impressed that managed ten days of wearing something I’ve made so far. Next year I think I’ll definitely do it for real!

New clothes

I’m trying not to buy too many new clothes, because I already have loads of things and I want to try to make more of my clothes going forward, but when I popped into M&S for some tights last week and saw this dress on sale for £12 I couldn’t resist it.

Shawl – Isaura
Dress – M&S
Shoes – Clarks

I also surprised myself today by buying a pair of trousers. I think the last time I bought trousers was about three years ago, and I’m mostly happy wearing skirts, but T bought me a top for my birthday that I think will look better with trousers, and it also struck me that a pair of plain trousers might be a good partner for me-made tops in pretty printed cottons which wouldn’t go with my print skirts (this is thinking ahead, and assumes that I have now worked out how to do a Full Bust Adjustment properly, of course). So I have bought a pair of navy blue cotton trousers in a pleat-fronted, tapered-leg style that a couple of years ago I’d have dismissed as unbelievably middle-aged looking, but which now look rather cute and a bit Fifties, and possibly even surprisingly trendy, and which also remind me of a pair of trousers I had in the late 90s that I remember wearing a lot and rather liking. Whether I ever actually wear them remains to be seen, of course!

It’s my birthday and I’ll wear penguins if I want to

A brief and early post today, as we’re going out to dinner, but I couldn’t think of a better occasion to debut the awesomeness that is my penguin skirt. Especially as I have a day full of meetings that will only be improved by being able to look down at my lap and see penguins!

Cardigan – Monsoon
Necklace – East
Top – M&S
Skirt – made by me
Shoes – Greenshoes

Dotty

I have to say, it is a fabulous feeling to go to work wearing an outfit I’ve made myself, and even more fabulous to have people compliment me on it and be able to reply ‘oh, thanks, I made it myself’.

Necklace – Fair Trade shop
Top and skirt – made by me
Belt – came with skirt
Shoes – Camper

After I’d finished sewing yesterday I watched some of the Craftsy “Sew The Perfect Fit” online class I’ve signed up to. I haven’t been making the test garment along with the course, and I’m not sure I’ll ever go through all the fitting steps the tutor outlines, but it is interesting and helpful watching and the episode I watched yesterday, on upper body adjustments, really helped with my understanding of how a properly fitted bodice should look. It also made me finally realise what the tutorials and sewing books mean when they talk about marking the ‘apex of the bust’, which is part of where I’ve been going wrong. I mean, I’m not stupid; I know what an apex is, but I’d normally associate it with triangles or at least something with a certain amount of pointiness, and busts are not generally pointy unless you’re wearing one of those weird conical bras like Madonna did. My bust is large and rounded and trying to decide which part of the (fairly large) forward-facing part was the forwardmost was really rather problematic. Rather like trying to find the apex of half a grapefruit, with the added problem that said you can only see said half-grapefruit in sideways view and only just far enough away from your eyes to focus on it.

Ah, you might say, but grapefuit have the little indenty bit where the stalk was, or the slightly pointy bit where the flower was. Surely that’s how you determine where their apexes are? To which I reply, well, yes, cleverclogs, but grapefruit aren’t actually perfectly symmetrical and the little indenty bit or the pointy bit might be kind of off-centre and not actually at the apex of the grapefuit at all.

Anyway, what I have now realised is that cleverclogs you are right, and mathematically precise me has been barking up the wrong tree trying to find the exact middle of the most forward-projecting part of my bust, because what the tutorials and sewing books actually mean when they say apex is nipple. Why they can’t just say nipple I don’t know, but anyway, that explains why all my darts end up looking wrong. So armed with this knowledge I might have another go at the Colette Sorbetto next time I have some sewing time and see how I get on!

If at first you don’t succeed…

I woke up this morning determined to have another go at yesterday’s Birgitte tee. Fortunately, there is a fabric shop in our village; even more fortunately, they are open on bank holidays; and most fortunately of all, they had a single reel of Gutterman all-purpose thread in colour 365 left in stock, pushed sideways in the display unit and not immediately obvious to passers-by, so my thread problem was solved. I chopped off the wiggly neckband (I was using the triple stretch stitch on my machine, which is completely impossible to unpick. I think I might just use a zigzag stitch next time), remeasured the neckline using the method illustrated in this post, which came up 10cm shorter than the method I’d been using yesterday of holding the tape measure against the fabric and sliding my hand along to turn the top round, cut a new neckband, and gave it another go.

I cut the neckband wider than the pattern said, 3 inches instead of 4cm, to allow for having lost a bit of the body with the previous neckband, but I’m not sure I really needed to. Saying that, I do like the way the wider band looks.

The top is possibly a bit on the long side; I think it would probably be better tucked in to skirts. I might make the next one a bit shorter.

The fabric is a viscose jersey that was £4.50 a metre from Croft Mill (and therefore cheap enough for semi-practice sewing); I bought a metre and a half because they only sell in 50cm lengths and I don’t think I could quite get a top out of a metre of fabric. It’s got a nice feel and drape to it, though it does cling quite a bit at the back (I don’t think this is a fit issue so much as a clingy-fabric-and-lumpy-body issue).

Anyway, I’m really pleased with it. I can make skirts and tops now! That’s a complete outfit!