Finished Victorian Collars

I finally finished the 2 collars for my dad's Victorian shirts, I am quite happy with the Pro-Woven interfacing that I used, it is a light weight, yet stiff interfacing, specifically for things like collars and cuffs. I am consistently amazed that when the proper ingredients are used to make things, the results are usually superior.

Scarf Photo

My cousin, who received the scarf that was my first knitting project as a Christmas gift, was kind enough to take this beautiful picture of it.

Finished 2nd knitting project

This is supposed to be my sewing blog, but somehow more knitting than sewing has been getting done recently, I hope to rectify that this weekend. However, in the mean time, I finished my second sewing project and this time I actually have a picture!

This was a good project after the plain scarf, I had to increase, decrease and figure out how to read a pattern. Now on to the reason for all of this yarn madness - the sweater! My goal is to finish this by next Christmas (I am planning on making it red) so that I can wear it to my husband's family Christmas gathering! I have managed to wear the same thing both of the last 2 years (totally by accident, I swear) and I plan to be wearing something different in 2010!

Sewing around the house

I have a few little functional projects before I get back to sewing clothes. We decided that we really needed something to keep the cat dishes from scratching the floor, hence cat dish pillows!!

Collar Band Draft

I did finally finish the scarf, even in time to wrap it up for the "Garage Sale" gift exchange at our family's Christmas celebration... unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of it. That's ok, the second knitting project will be in the works as soon as I learn to read the pattern better! The pattern is from Dovetail Designs:


In the mean time I am working on some small sewing projects, starting with a set of Victorian collars for my dad. These collars literally button onto the shirt, which has a band already attached. I tried this a few years ago without success; however, since then I have learned to draft collars, so I am hoping that this will be a better experience. This morning I got the pattern out that I had been using, and the measurement of the band was not all that different from what I was drafting to, so I decided to make a muslin (mockup) of both:

The upper one is the one that I drafted using Kenneth King's method, and the bottom one is the one from the Buckaroo Bobbins pattern, we'll see which one works better.

Actual Sewing!

I finally get to post some sewing on my sewing blog! Here are the 2 messenger bags that I completed as gifts for friends:

These were done using the Mischievous Gnome Messenger Bag from Sew Liberated

I also finished the tree skirt for my parents, however I forgot to take pictures of it. Now onto doing some Victorian collars for my dad and a tree skirt for my in-laws! Hopefully during all of this, I will have time to finish the wool pants I cut out several weeks ago...

New Beginnings

As I went to continue on my scarf tonight, I discovered that I had managed to somehow create what looked to be a very large hole. It was not a dropped stitch exactly, but since it was a much larger mess than the first hole I had and it wasn't knitting back together well...I decided to start over! Pulling everything out was actually much more fun than ripping out a seam when sewing at least, and when I was done I had a huge pile of a cat toy on the floor! I then started over with a much cleaner stockinette stitch, and without the "decorative" rows from the previous attempt, but that's ok, the point here is to practice!