A Problem of Fit

In the evenings, I’ve been sitting in the fading light, watching Bones on my computer and working on my sweater. Which will be done long before October, and therefore long before I can wear it. But I ran into a problem that might make it take longer than expected.

The Fit Part

I like this project, but remember how I said I was going to try to make this sweater more fitted?  Yeah, well, that part is testing my patience with making clothing.

Fit is the reason I don’t make clothing. It’s hard. It’s not easy to wrestle with your particular body type and its oddities. And the truth is that ready-made clothing is wonderful, but it leads to most people making do with a fit that is less than desirable. In my case, I discovered just how it is that I’m making up for the fact that most clothing is meant for women who are rather less generously endowed than I in the bust region.

So what really I meant by “making the sweater more fitted” was in reality my code for trying to give myself an adequate amount of bust room. The blue sweater that I made last year was great, mostly, but there wasn’t enough bust room, and it made for a weird fit. I wanted to fix that this time around.

I figured that I simply needed to add some stitches toward the top of the front.  I even added them in a clever manner that spaced them out.  I figured it was better to give myself extra room where, anatomically, I seem to need it most.  The red triangles are my increases from just under the bust to the top.

So far so good.  I held it up to myself and behold!  The edges came just to where they should!  It worked!

Then I pinned the front to the back and discovered a problem I had not expected. When I add room specially for the bust, it means the rest of the garment doesn’t have to try to make up for a lack of room.  It turns out I am not actually an extra large. I’m more like a medium.  I am just used to whatever extra fabric I have on the back of the shirts I buy making up for the fabric the manufacturer didn’t put on the front of the shirt. So when I made the back piece my “usual” (and wrong!) size it was just plain too wide.  I’ve got nearly three inches of room I don’t need.

But … how in the world do I do that without re-crocheting the whole thing?  Can I?  ::sigh::

I have decided, for the moment, to persevere with what I have.  I spent too much time crocheting the back to just frog it right now.  If it’s too awful, I will re-crochet the back, although the prospect does not delight me.  One thing I know, though, is that I will crochet my clothing projects differently in the future.

Is she looking at me accusingly?

I suspect it’s becaue she knows I started a new project when I’ve already got half a dozen in the works. I think my next post might have to be a “confession” post about everything I’ve got going, and the stage it’s in.  Might be good just to get myself a little accounting. I think I forget about things after a while. (Actually, Callie’s hoping I will feed her here, and confused about the yarn I’ve put in front of her face that she knows she’s not supposed to touch.)

So this sweater is loosely - and I do mean loosely - based on a sweater in the May/June 2009 issue of Crochet Today called the Summer Breeze Cardi by Elena Malo. It’s a fairly simple 3/4 sleeve cardigan, but the part I’m truly using is the yoke. I can’t find a decent link/picture, so here’s a picture of the cardigan from the magazine.

The changes I’m making to the pattern (dangerous!) are:

1. I am not making a cardigan, I’m doing a single front piece with a back piece, and I plan to do some shaping to it so it won’t be just a straight sweater.
2. I’m cutting out the bubble stitch detail. It’s just not me.
3. No button (obviously).
4. I made up my own stitch pattern for the body and sleeves. The way the picture is shot doesn’t show you there’s extra detail at the waist and on down to the hem, and I guess that just turned me off of using this mostly plain pattern.
5. I will be attaching a simple charmeuse shell to the inside. It’s not a closed pattern at all.

My stitch pattern is simple:  Row 1 treble crochet, Rows 2 and 3 single crochet. Repeat.  This is what it looks like. The yarn I’m using is pedestrian. It was handy: left over from my flower blanket, the humble and yet pretty Caron Simply Soft in Autumn Red. I really love the color of this yarn, actually, and I have three extra skeins (I got carried away). So yarn snobs will just have to sniff at my acrylic, and I will itch tremendously at their wool. It’s a fair trade.

The things I’m keeping about the pattern are:

1. The open-stitch yoke. I like how far down on the shoulders it comes. I may even only do two rows. I do hate things that come up too far on my neck.
2. The split in the yoke. Although I’m not making a cardigan, I’m going to split the yoke in front. I like the detail.
3. The 3/4 length sleeves are staying. I will need to remember to make mine fitted like that.
4. The construction of the arm and body pieces. I think the pattern is fitted together pleasingly.

I am not very far along on this, so we will see.  If all goes well, I predict I will have a sweater to wear in October (what, you don’t think I’ll keep at this continuously, do you?). The timing is really fine, because no one in their right mind wears a sweater during the summer months here when it’s 95 - 110 F all the time. It would just be awful to sweat that much.

Lastly, I leave you with me and my coworkers from last Thursday. It is an odd pic for me to post, as it is of people which I have never done before, but I’m feeling a bit nostalgic (already) because the one on the far left is leaving us. I’ve spent a lot of time with these three folks over the past three years. These have been my friends and cohorts in fundraising and putting on that enormous 550-person lunch I talked about: Abby, Margaret-the-wonder-boss and Will. Yeah, and that’s me in black, with a small flower in my hair. Abby’s going to be so surprised to see this here! She sometimes ready this here blog. Hi Abby!

I’m going to go figure out what all of the projects I’m working on now really are.

Flowers for my Mom

This past weekend Jeff and I made a trip to Houston to visit our respective mothers. Since I work on Mother’s Day, we were a week late, but the love is still there, right?

So for this past Mother’s Day I decided to make my mother a gift of one of her favorite things, violets. I wouldn’t have thought of it except one of my favorite crochet designers - June Gilbank - provided a lovely pattern for a cute little pot of violets just in time to make them for the day.  It didn’t take too long to make it, it was fun, and it turned out so, so well!  June is one of my favorite designers because her patterns are deceptively simple, but just exactly right.

As you maybe can see from the picture, my mother loves violets, and as long as I can remember has grown lovely examples on her kitchen windowsill. So the idea was to make her a special, permanently flowering version of them.  I took June’s pattern and altered it just a wee bit, and it became not just a pot of violets, but a basket for jewelry.

I made sure to use fuzzy green yarn (Jiffy yarn in Avocado) for the leaves, because I always loved the soft velvet of violet leaves. Apart from that, the main difference from the pattern was that I split it in half to make a basket.  The original design is all one piece and stuffed with fiberfill.  In order to change it, I judiciously applied plastic cross stitch canvas, some matching stash fabric and a bit of fiberfill.

The first step was to cut out circles of plastic canvas to stiffen the flower top “lid” and the bottom of the pot.  Then I sewed a rectangle of the canvas into a circle shape to stiffen the pot sides.  I also sewed the circle for the pot bottom to the sides. I used plastic canvas because (1) I could sew it and (2) plastic doesn’t disintegrate over time like cardboard does and (3) it’s waterproof.

Next I got a large circle of coordinating fabric from my stash and stuffed it into the little basket made from plastic canvas.  I stitched the fabric to the canvas with yarn around the top, and then I tacked the fabric to the bottom of the pot with four tiny stitches, also using yarn.  That leaves you with a basket lined with fabric.  Then I trimmed some of the major excess off the outside, still leaving a considerable amount so it’s fabric-lined inside and out.  Here’s the lining basket after sewing (and a lovely picture of the Men’s Health magazine I was using as a table).

The final step was to stuff the fabric basket into the yarn basket and smooth the fabric down, and tack them together with matching yarn. Voila!  fabric lining inside and out. Creating a lovely, structured, lined basket capable of holding the most lovely of jewelry, if I do say so myself.

I did something similar to structure the “flower lid” by adding a circle of plastic canvas to the bottom of the lid. I also obviously added the brown lid bottom to suggest the dirt the flowers are growing in.  In the original there is no need for this bottom.  Apart from the canvas, the lid is mostly stuffed with fiberfill.  The crocheted bottom structured with plastic canvas is the lovely structural finishing touch that makes the lid match the bottom in shape and style. I don’t want to say more beyond that, because I don’t want to give away June’s clever pattern.

I also added a “lip” to the top and bottom of the crocheted pieces in white by adding two rows - I crocheted around twice in both the back loop and front loop of the last row of the top and bottom.  The point of the lip is to create a way to fit the basket together in a neat way. (sorry for the fuzzy picture below)  I did this before attaching the fabric.  You can see the bottom of the lid including the “dirt” bottom and lip in the picture of the two halves also.

So that was my Mother’s Day gift to my mom!  She loves jewelry and violets and purple, what better way to tell her her crafty daughter loves her than to make something out of the things she loves?