StefCo♥

Two cloches, as cloches are a hat that suits me, one from Boutique Knits and one from Knitty. Made this past winter. 

Headband with superpower knit cable action! Simple, adorable, effective. No patterns necessary.

(PS, thank you so much to the lovely ladies in my family who have donated for my latest endeavor, I would already be nothing without you, and your continued support of all of my creative projects is simply astounding as well as heart warming. I love you so much, thank you for being such amazing women for me to look up to and take after.)

I’ve been trying to keep my craft posts somewhat brief in the description area. This sweater has a little bit of a story to it. Not necessarily an exciting story, but a story nonetheless.

Several years ago I started this sweater that I fell in love with from Twist Collective. Except I changed it from having the little sitting birds to having little swallows, because swallows are purty. My dad bought me the yarn as a Christmas gift (or was it Birthday?), and they didn’t quite have the color of tan that I wanted so I got an off-white and experimented with tea-dying. And then I started the sweater. This is back when I still lived in Long Beach, which means that it was at least 4 years ago. 

I kept picking it up every winter for a short period of time, and then putting it back down after I’d get frustrated with some part of the instructions. Last fall I started working at a yarn store, and started thinking about knitting all the time, and decided I needed to finish it. When I picked the instructions back up I realized how easy they were now that I had been thinking about knitting all the time and had not immediately put it back down after the holidays (as I have in most years past.)

So I was knitting on it and getting close to finishing… And then I ran out of yarn. Gosh darnit. I went to our competing yarn store, where I bought the yarn all those years ago. They had a few remnants of that yarn which they had since discontinued, but of course only in such lovely colors as salmon pink and sage green—not the original cream, or by the miracle I was hoping for in a magical color that would match the tea-dyed yarn. SO. I found another fingering weight yarn in off white, took it home, tea dyed it, and to my delight it was pretty darn close to the original yarn. Not perfect, but close.

I finished the sweater, washed it, blocked it, and low and behold you can barely tell that the yarn on the shoulders is not the same as the rest of the sweater. I even forget, sometimes, unless I’m really looking at it and thinking about it. 

I’m happy to finally have finished it because it is quite a lovely sweater. And it is one of the few things that I have ever knit that people actually very rarely ask me if I made it, and when I tell them I made it they’re surprised. Which is pretty fun. I usually take a lot of pride in having hand made things that look hand made (which in my mind this sweater does), but it is still somehow a bit of an ego boost when people are surprised that something so intricate, or complicated, or well made (or whatever it is about this particular sweater that catches people by surprise) can still be made by hand. 

The thing about living out here in the semi-wilderness is that it is incredibly muddy here in the rainier months of the year. This leads to mud, dirt, and any number of debris being tracked all over one’s shipping container room, and in the future one’s tiny house. This is why before I even moved out there I created this little door mat.

This poor little rug has been no match for the vast quantities of muck that get dragged into our room, but it does gather quite a bit of what would otherwise also need to be swept up. Plus, it’s super cute.

I washed it the other day in a washing machine I made out of a bucket and some rocks! We here at the Lookout Arts Quarry like to eschew all modern conveniences. Why? Um… Because it makes us look cool? 

Made out of old sheets/scraps of fabric that I cut into long strips and then knitted using some ridiculously large plastic needles, utilizing the ultra-fancy “garter stitch.” 

Here is a sweater I made for myself at the start of the new year. And then re-made for myself from the armpits up. And then remade from the armpits up once more. And will probably modify just a tad (change the hem, lengthen the sleeves a tad) when I have the patience to do it. I designed it myself and knit it up out of two giant hanks of Perendale Wool. Sweet, sweet stripey action.

These are one pair of legwarmers I made for the lovely Jen of Jen’s House of Chai as part of a trade. I made them up on the fly, and if you look closely I fudged up the pattern ever so slightly in the stripes. So they don’t totally match up. But they are similar enough that they look like a set and perhaps only make me look like more of an artistic genius, BECAUSE they match without matching. Yes.

My grandmother requested dishcloths for Christmas this year, so I made her some. I also made my other grandmother some (similar, but different!) dish towels. Both of my grandmothers are lovely, lovely women and it was fun to make them these practical but fancy gifts.

I also made myself some dish cloths, because they are super handy! And a great way to use up all this cotton yarn I seem to have randomly accumulated over the years…

(The warshcloths I made for my G-ma, which are the solid red and blue ones, are block’s from Nicky Epstein’s book Knitting Block by Block. The rest are patterns I improvised.)

(Yet another pair of armwarmers! Lovely, lacey armwarmers.)

It’s after the holidays and I have lots of posts to make on holiday gift creations. But before that, what I want to talk about today here is something that is incredibly exciting! And that is new years resolutions.

For the last few months I have been pondering this idea that I randomly sort of thought about one day and have been getting more and more excited about implementing it. It is going to mean being more crafty, creative, and creating better blog posts! As well as being more, you know, sustainable, eco friendly, intentional, and all that other hippie dippie lovelyness.

By the end of 2012 I want at least 85% of my wardrobe to be hand made.

This means that after the new year I will go through my entire wardrobe, count how many articles of clothing I own, and tally how many of them are hand made, partially hand made, or factory made. I will then, throughout the year, begin replacing more and more of the factory items with handmade items.

I would like to make a lot of things myself—which is one reason why I’m doing this. To really push my personal creativity and personal productivity. I would also like to support fellow artisan crafters by purchasing their goods as opposed to corporate companies.

I realize that there are some blurry lines when it comes to what is truly “hand made” and what isn’t. For instance, there are some really great screen printers who make amazing art… on factory made shirts. There are also some amazing clothes to be made by simply altering factory made clothes. I’m going to count these sort of items as 50% hand made in the tally of things.

Things that are made mostly from scratch or raw materials are the 100% hand made items. And then obviously, store bought factory made items are 0% hand made.

Because my purpose for doing this also extends to my desire to be more eco friendly as well as less supportive of extortive big company practices I’m also going to as much as possible source the raw materials that I use in my own hand made goods from companies that use good practices, or (even better) from recycled materials. This means more domestically spun yarn for knitting, domestically woven fabric for sewing, purchasing such things from local stores, and scavenging free piles and thrift stores for other materials.

I also hope to make regular blog posts about my progress with this and really stick with it for the whole year. Maybe next year I’ll even step it up a notch and go for the 100%, though right now I’m trying to be realistic about what I am going to be comfortable and happy with, and that means holding on to a few articles of factory made goods. I do not, however, plan on purchasing any factory made clothing in 2012. The last bits of clothing that I received for Christmas this year (which includes mostly socks and long underwear, which DO count in the clothing tally) are the last ones I hope to purchase or have purchased for me.

So expect updates on this, as well as regular updates on other crafty endeavors, in the future!

Happy New Year everyone!