The 776-Weekend Lace-Edged Pillowcases

Lest you think that the Scotland Silk Felt Scarf was the oldest unfinished (unstarted, even) project in the depths of my yarn stash, today we’re talking about something even more ridiculous.

As I was going through my yarn stash, I found this plastic drawstring bag with plain white pillowcases in it, plus some mystery knitting all rolled up in the bottom. When I opened it up, I suddenly had a moment of revelation that I had somehow opened up a portal to the past.

Way back in October 2005, when I had only been knitting for real (rather than just making travesties that didn’t fit any humans) for about a year, I bought this lovely book, Weekend Knitting.

It’s full of good projects for beginners, but not boring enough that you wouldn’t return to it later in your knitting career. I saw this pattern, Lace-Edged Pillowcases by Alissa Baptista and figured that it was something I could definitely do that would increase my lace confidence, plus I needed something pretty for my first apartment in Colorado after fleeing New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina. I bought up a few balls of Omega Sinfonia Mercerized Cotton (available at certain big box craft stores) and a pair of size 3 needles (as I wasn’t yet a crazy needle-hoarder as I am now) and got started right away.

This was before Ravelry existed, so I even posted a little entry about it in my Stitch ‘n Bitch project journal. How cute was I?

I got all the way to the end of the knitting portion for both inserts, put my stitches on holders, bought some blank white pillowcases…and then promptly forgot about it for 15 years. When I found it again during this stupid, stupid year, it coordinated perfectly with Dan and I messing around with guest room stuff in our house, as well as with me finally taking the time to go through all of my grandmother’s amazing old sewing and quilting stuff in order to add it all to our new craft room. What better time than a continuing nightmare hellscape of pandemic + hurricanes to do a whole boatload of hand-sewing?

Before I could do that, I had to block the lace panels, as they had been rolled up and crumpled for so long, and mercerized cotton loves to look as angry as possible unless you treat it nicely. The panels got a soak in some wool wash and then threaded onto some blocking wires.

I stretched them out to the absolute limit, just to make sure that all of those lovely lace eyelets opened up fully and the fabric was more drapey, rather than stiff, another potential hazard of mercerized cotton.

This is the “love braid” lace option from the pattern, by the way, as the other was much more boring.

The original pattern just recommends cutting your pillowcase edge off and then putting in the lace panel, but with the length of the ones that I had, simply inserting the lace would have resulted in the lace just getting folded under the pillow on the bed and not really getting seen. That seemed very silly, so I cut a 3″ panel out instead (after washing and ironing the cases, of course), keeping the pillowcase roughly the same length after finishing.

The pattern stated to fold over a 1/4″ hem, but I am super inept at hand-sewing and did 1/2″ instead so that I wasn’t aiming for such a tiny target with my giant sausage fingers. Also, if raw edges still existing after sewing bother you, please close your eyes for a little while because I just couldn’t be bothered to care.

But please still keep reading. Somehow.

I did my running stitch to hem the sides about 1/8″ from the edge so that I had a straight line to aim for when stitching the knitting on, since it needed to line up straight and not have any fabric showing through the holes.

This means that you only have just 1 tiny edge stitch to work with on either side when you get sewing. I’m sure that people who sew a lot are wondering why that is such a big deal, but sewing of all kinds (except when it involves yarn) feels like such an unnatural action to me that every challenge feels so, so very big.

After the panels are pinned in place, lined up with the seam of the pillowcase, you have to unwind the excess knitting to get it to line up properly.

Such a fun mess.

Then, when the panel is the correct size to line up with the cast-on edge, you bind it off and sew them together.

The lace will not line up properly, but you are just going to have to let that shit go. It’s been 15 years already.

Then, the sewing!

I had no idea of the proper way to do this, but it seemed like the easiest way to make sure that the stitches were relatively invisible, but visible enough for my hesitant self to see what I was doing, was to whipstitch the panels in place.

This took seventy-billion years, so I needed some hand-stitching motivation in the form of a several-day Bernadette Banner deep dive. I am by no means a historical fashion wearer (or remotely good at sewing, as we can all see), but I find her videos completely fascinating and wonderful company for all types of project making. Do go check her out.

After all of that stitching was done, I pressed the seams down on the inside and then pressed the whole thing from the outside, just to make sure there were no residual fabric wrinkles, since there is no way to make the fabrics match up perfectly.

And then I danced around, whooping and fist-pumping because I finally finished my “weekend knitting” project.

Although it took me approximately 776 weekends instead.

I mean, look at those tiny stitches. Can you blame me?

I am beyond happy with how these came out. Our guests, if we ever have any again in the post-plague times, will lay their heads on these lovelies, and I will be so stoked.

Here’s a hint of the next post to come. Peg board and a mysterious sewing machine? Oooooooh.

Stabbing and Boiling the Scotland Silk Felt Scarf

And now for something completely different.

In the interim between knitting a boatload of socks and the world attempting to right itself, Dan and I decided to take on a little project where we changed over one of our empty rooms (previously masquerading as a guest room but unfortunately serving as a lazy storage room) into a craft room. Pictures of that process later, I promise, as I am beyond elated at how it turned out.

As a part of that process, I made myself go through my knitting books and my yarn and tool stash to give away things I didn’t use anymore and to organize things better. During that process, I found this.

Back when I lived in Colorado, I used to work at a yarn store with some truly amazing coworkers and a horrible monster as a boss. (That fact is unrelated, but I just felt the need to reiterate just how awful of a person she was.) While I was there, we had a really interesting day when a representative from Skacel Yarns, of Addi Needle fame, came and demonstrated their new (at the time) product called Artfelt. It was a system for needle/machine felting that included some really vibrantly-dyed pencil and standard roving, which is normally used to spin yarn. However, with this special sort of paper, kind of similar to dryer sheets, you could needle-felt your own designs, and shrink them in the dryer, ending up with thin, delicate sheets of felted wool fabric that you could drape or sew with, rather than the big bulky felt purses and bags that were popular at the time.  Like Shrinky Dinks for yarn!

I helped the instructor demo the project and really enjoyed myself, so I made sure that I bought a kit. And then, in true crafty-person fashion, I stuffed it in a basket and forgot about it for 12-ish years.

This age became very apparent when I tried to take the directions out and they ended up being permanently fused to the plastic kit bag, due to multiple housing moves and now nearly 10 years in New Orleans humidity.

I was determined to take this horrible continuing pandemic and hurricane-filled month of August and make this damn thing, so I pieced together what I could and went with it.

There, much better.

The kit that I had was called the Silk Scarf Kit, in the colorway Scotland. Of course, this kit no longer seems to be available on the Skacel Artfelt website, but if you wanted to put together something similar, they still seem to have all of the elements available. You’d just need the Artfelt paper, felting needles, the tack board (or any kind of protective squishy surface), any kind of ribbon you want (the actual skein is pictured below), and the multicolored standard roving and pencil roving in the colorway Cobblestone.

Onto the making. First things first, the paper was behaving as though it had been crumpled up in a tube for 12 years (funny, that), so it needed a day to flatten out.

After the paper was behaving properly, I marked out 1.5″ intervals until I got to 72″ long and drew out straight lines at the marks, copying them later with permanent marker because they get very difficult to see once there’s a bunch of wool on top of them.

Then, I had to cut 96 pieces of pencil roving 10″ long. I ended up doing a few more than that because I wanted a bunch of color variation throughout the whole thing, and you end up with plenty of pencil roving left over.

Then, you lay out those pencil roving strips onto the lines you created, place the whole thing on the tack board (or any kind of thick piece of foam, felt, or towel so that you don’t stab yourself or your floor because felting needles are the sharpest things on the planet), and stab it repeatedly.

Just so much stabbing.

Really, you are just trying to get the wool to stay in place on the paper. If you can lift the paper and the wool roving stays put, you’re good, so no need to overstab.

After all of that stabbing is done, you get to mess around with this beautiful stuff.  Seta-Moda is a 100% silk ribbon with gorgeous shine and saturated colors.

Really, you can use any ribbon or accent yarn that you want, just as long as it doesn’t have wool in it, so it won’t felt together and blend into the background.

I cut 11 long strips of the silk, and laid 6 of them across the top of the work, pinned in place on the tack board so that they wouldn’t slide around too much.

Now here comes the meat of the scarf. (Gross.) You take your standard roving and pull it apart, giving yourself light and transparent handfuls of wool.

Then, you sort of…paint with it, covering the lines with broad swathes of color.

After that, you add the remaining 5 pieces of silk in the same manner, in-between the ones you did before so they aren’t right on top of each other.

Then, you put pencil roving pieces down right exactly on top of the previous row, and the stabbing begins again!

It’s kind of hard to see here, but those little tufts poking through the back of the paper are the result of the stabbings, keeping the whole thing together on the paper. When you pull it off of the tack board, it also makes this extremely delightful soft and sticky sound that made my ASMR-loving self super happy.

Part of the goal is to keep the entire thing covered with wool, but still transparent enough to see all of the layers underneath, because you do not want to stab the silk ribbons in all of your stabbing adventures.

I definitely got better at this as I went along, as it took some practice.

Unfortunately, as soon as I felt like I knew what I was doing, it was all done.

All of that make sense? Great. Now comes the really wild stuff.

After the stabbings are complete, you throw the whole thing in the bathtub and wet it thoroughly. It needs to be saturated.

Then, you lay it out on this giant piece of plastic that comes with the paper…

…you roll it up into a strange wool-silk-dryer sheet-plastic hot dog…

…you shove it into an old pair of stockings or leggings (bright turquoise is best, of course), and then you put it by itself into a pre-heated dryer.

Mine clanged around in there for nearly 30 minutes until this came out.

Looking slightly smaller, wrinklier, and…feltier? You basically just want it to felt enough to make sure that the layers are stuck to each other, not dense enough to get something that feels like a hockey puck.

The instructions said that if it was done correctly, the paper would be wrinkled in the back, so I think we were perfect.

Now for the boiling. You’d think that after I complained so much about my fingers hurting after making all of those socks, I’d be less inclined to do a project that exclusively involves fingertip-mangling sharp needles and boiling water. Nope.

You boil a whole bunch of water and then try to transfer it to your bathroom without giving yourself 3rd degree burns.

Then, you pour it all over the scarf, paper-side up I assumed, and the magic Artfelt paper magically dissolves away. It was actually pretty cool.

I did end up with a few leftover bits, so I needed to hit it again strategically with the boiling water, but otherwise it went pretty smoothly.

Then, I squeezed out all of the water and gave it a very quick once-over with an iron on low heat, just to make sure everything was sticking down properly.

And here she is.

And I am underwhelmed.

It really is very cool that you can get such a delicate, thin woolen fabric using this technique, as it drapes very nicely and feels very soft.

However, I feel like the colors that were so rich and vibrant, in both the silk and the wool, are now sort of flat and dull in their felted state. And the wrinkling?

After seeing how lovely it was in its pre-felted state, the wrinkling just detracts so much from the original geometric pattern. Why on earth did I need to be so careful and exact with my lines and my stabbings if it was just going to wiggle out of shape as it shrank?

Nevertheless, it was really fun to make and it was wonderful learning a new technique (that I might never do again, but oh well), plus the colors do look nice even though they are a shadow of their former selves. I’m not sure if I should keep this for myself or if I should give it to my mom or some other other older-type lady who might really love it.

I’m torn. But at least I got to spend a good chunk of time where I wasn’t alone with my thoughts of this broken world, which was a plus.

Stay tuned for another long-overdue project completion, coming soon.

Sockpocalypse Summer, part 10 – Finale Helix Socks

Well, ladies and gents and non-binary friends, we’ve come to the end.

A rather beautifully stripey end, if I do say so myself.

As I described long ago at the beginning of this self-induced Sockpocalypse, way back in May (good lord, it seems like years ago), I originally posted a photo of eight different sock yarn skeins and had people choose for themselves. I added a pair of socks at the beginning for myself, which brought the grand total up to 9. Minutes after the last skein was claimed, my college friend Polly saw the post and lamented the fact that she wasn’t able to snag one in time.

Now, if you have been a reader of this blog for a while, you know that I save all of my odds and ends, especially of sock yarns, for two important reasons. One, to make tiny little garter bias squares for a blanket that won’t be finished until I am geriatric. Two, to make helix socks!

Helix socks, described here in detail by the great Grumperina, whose recipe served as the framework here, are a super fun way to use up sock yarn leftovers. You can combine disparate colors and patterns and turn them into the truly gorgeous random stripe patterns of your dreams. (If you want to see me truly geek out over this in a deeply embarrassing way, read all about my first helical sock experience here with my Hurricane Helix socks.)

After all of the initial Sockpocalypse Socks were finished, I took pictures of all of the potential sock leftover candidates that I had available, and had Polly choose a base color and three stripe colors. Pictured above, her choices were (clockwise from the top) Knit Picks Stroll Tonal in Mountain Pass (last seen in Sockpocalypse Summer, part 5), Pagewood Farms Denali in Woodsy (last seen in Drachenschwingen and as the much-beloved yarn chicken toe cap fix in Sockpocalypse Summer, part 6), and Mountain Colors Bearfoot in Mountain Twilight (last seen long ago in my Kai-Mei socks).

For the base color she chose Valley Yarns Huntington in Grey, the perfect neutral background for all of this crazy color. I was initially a little bit worried that with the predominant purple, green, and gold tones that we were going to get something a little…Mardi Gras-y. I needn’t have worried, though, since the helical knitting structure and the natural variegation in the yarns made for some really lovely color randomization.

I mean, look at that. You’ve got purples, greens, and golds, yes, but also white, cream, silver, teal…

…royal blue, amber, chocolate, and turquoise in there. So many colors in such seemingly unassuming yarn.

And admittedly, the wrong side of socks rarely ever gets much love, but look at how gorgeous this is! The purl bumps disperse the color out for an even more lovely effect. I want a whole sweater of it.

Because the original sock recipe is more of a guide than a pattern, here are some specifics, if you’re so inclined to stash-bust and make some for yourself. I cast on 64 sts (which works for a US size 8-8.5 foot) with US size 2/2.75mm needles, did 12 rows of 2×2 ribbing with the main color, and then knit 40 rows of helix stripes, stopping before the end of the 40th row on needle 4. At that point, you’ll have your main color, and you can do the heel of your choice.

This heel is Laura Chau’s fabulous short-row heel, the only short-row heel tutorial you’ll ever need.

After the heel, the main color ends up right where you need it again, and you knit more helical stripes until you’re 2″ less than the foot length, which was 64 rows in this case. If you’ve stopped on a multiple of 4 (which, if you’re following along, you absolutely should), your main color is again right where you need it for the toe of your choice. I just did a flat toe cap, but you can do whatever pleases you.

And then you can put them on and ogle those stripes some more.

As Polly pointed out when I sent her an in-progress picture, the stripes are super witchy in the best way, perfect for the upcoming fall in Portland, where they’re headed as we speak.

—–

And that’s it! The finale of my Sockpocalypse Summer! Thanks to all of you who actually sat and read through these deranged sock-based musings for three months. It’s definitely not just the knitting I love, but the documentation of the process, and those of you who read and look at the pictures and enjoy it really make my day.

Needless to say, it’ll probably be a little while before I get back on the tiny-needled sock train, if only to give my fingertips and my brain a break. I honestly thought, when I started this project, that there was no way the pandemic would still be going by the time I hand-knit 10 pairs of custom socks, but here we are. Stay tuned for more craft-based foolishness while I attempt to entertain myself while looking for an FNP job (oh right, I forgot to tell everyone that I graduated from grad school with my doctorate and passed my FNP certification exam…whoops) and trying not to lose my mind.

Sockpocalypse Summer, part 9 – Earthbound

It’s our second-to-last installment of the Sockpocalypse, and here’s a very special pair of socks for a very special friend.

I’ve talked at length before about how you have to be prepared to get out the big guns for a fellow knitter. You don’t make them something that they could have made for themselves. You push yourself.

Amanda was one of my very first knitting friends. She was a customer at the yarn shop in Colorado where I used to work, and after helping her with a few projects, she started coming to my weekly project class, where customers all got together to work on big projects and get ongoing help from yours truly. Not like she really needed my help, of course. I think we were all just excited to form a new group of crafty people, far from the watchful eye of the horrible owner of the store. She is super fun, a wonderful listener, endlessly kind and accepting, and always game for some first-rate silliness.

After I left the store, the group still got together every week, alternately at a cool witchy community center and an ice cream parlor, knitting and chatting about our lives. When I got really sick, Amanda kept the group together until my mandated bedrest was over. Over 10 years later, we continue to share our lives, knitting projects, silly pictures of our dinner, and Monty Python quotes, and I am so happy she is part of my life.

So, when Amanda chose this beautiful skein of chocolately browns for her Sockpocalypse socks, I knew I had to make her something special. (Knit Picks Tonal in Nature Walk, and yes, of course, it’s discontinued! Why wouldn’t it be!) Together, we decided on Earthbound, a very clever bit of toe-up socking.

Only one problem. I’ve never made toe-up socks before. I am a cuff-down, DPN, one at a time sock girl. I was excited, but terrified to really fuck it all up royally.

Luckily, Knitty provides links to both of the special techniques needed for this project. Firstly? Judy’s Magic Cast-On, a perfectly seamless cast-on for the perfect toes. I seriously danced around on the couch the first time I completed it, however I kept a vise grip on those needles because I was terrified that the whole thing would fall apart if I
accidentally looked at it wrong.

Having a perfect seamless toe was particularly important here, since the patterning goes all the way down to the tip of the toe. Not something you see very often, but something that made me inordinately excited.

Secondly? Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off!

One of my initial trepidations in making toe-up socks in the first place was the fact that I tend to bind-off really tightly. I have to intentionally size-up my needles on bind-offs all the time to make sure that I don’t ruin projects all in the last row. I was worried that my bind-off would make it so that the socks wouldn’t even fit on a foot.

This stretchy bind-off is a freaking revelation. You basically add yarnovers into the stitches as you bind off, but it never makes it weird or loose or wavy. It stretches out with the established ribbing and lays perfectly flat. It’s definitely part of my knitting toolbox now.

It really makes all of those twisted stitches look so damn good.

And speaking of twisted stitches? There are so goddamn many of them.

Twisted stitches in the heel. Twisted stitches in the ribbing. Twisted stitches hidden in the lace that make all of the increases nearly invisible.

Twisted stitches spread out over three separate charts to make this gorgeous front lace panel, just as fiddly and persnickety as I like it.

Admittedly, I was a little skeptical even after putting in all that work because, when the sock comes off the needles, it looks…deflated and boxy and sad. But block those babies and put them on a foot, and they become something really special, which is the only thing acceptable for a project for Amanda.

Coming soon? The very last Sockpocalypse Summer installment. I know, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself either.