Studio Marlowe

Once again, long time, no blog.  Things have been busy!  But, I have still been knitting.  See?

Yes, that’s my tetris scrap afghan that I started a year or so ago.  No, it isn’t finished.  It is, however, starting to look more afghan-like in its proportions (as opposed to misshapen and oversized washcloth like).  I’ve run into a bit of a snag with regards to color balance, though.  While I still have loads of different purple yarns, I’m running thin on both browns and strong pinks.  No good.  Fortunately, I’m taking the train down to my parents’ this weekend, where I have a fair amount of stash in semi-permanent storage.  I know there are a couple of balls at least kicking around down there that will be perfect for this project.  And my mother will be thrilled that some of my yarn is leaving the house! 

I don’t know about you, but I have been hearing a ton of buzz about green smoothies over the past year or so.  As always, I am reluctant to be at the cutting edge of any trend, so naturally I did not try them for a while.  However, I’ve recently been experimenting with incorporating more raw foods into my diet so I decided to give the green smoothing thing a try also:

The big summer fruit season is mostly over so I’ve been keeping mine pretty simple: soymilk, an apple, an orange, and a couple cups of raw kale or spinach.  Yes, it looks like space alien slime. But! It is really pretty delicious and the taste of greens is not overpowering or really strong at all.  I’ve been drinking these for breakfast for the past couple of weeks, sometimes with different fruits (last week I was lucky enough to score a pomegranate!).  With the soymilk, they have a nice balance of carbs and proteins and really keep me going until lunch.  As an added bonus, I’m noticing that my skin is much clearer and has a bit of a fresh looking glow to it that only seems to come when I’m loading up on the raw fruits and vegetables.

Well, clearly this posting every day for a month thing is going nowhere fast.  I’ve been busy!  But, some of that busy has been knitting, finally.

My current project is a pair of sample hats for a class I am teaching in December.  This weekend I took a train trip to San Francisco, so I had loads of time to work on them on the way up:

The pattern is one of my own, and you can find it in the 2009 Gifts issue of Interweave Knits.  For the class samples, I’m using the recommended yarn (Canopy fingering), but we’re mixing up the color schemes a bit. I am really loving working with this yarn so I think I’m going to have to find more reasons to use it in the future!

And of course, I eventually had to come back from San Francisco, which meant another round of knitting (unfortunately every time I thought to take a photo we were bumping like crazy, so apologies for the blurring):

Believe it or not, I have actually found some time to knit while working on the chaise lounge.  My main project at the moment is the navy wrap I mentioned a few posts back:

This is a very simple, top-down pattern with just a bit of cabled edging to add some visual interest.  Overall it’s been pretty simple and mindless knitting, which is about all I’ve been able to handle since I had such a huge other project ongoing.  I’m loving the way it’s coming out and the yarn is still incredibly soft–I can’t wait to finish and wear it!

Yesterday kicked off November, which, it is starting to seem, is National Everything Month.  I think NaNoWriMo was the starter, but I’m no way writing a novel anytime soon.  I thought I could, however, try to blog everyday.  Although I’m off to a flying start with having missed the 1st.  Ooops.  But, for the rest of the month, I am going to try to post on a daily basis, at least during the week.

And I’ll kick things off by announcing that I am finally FINISHED with my huge sewing project!  That’s right, I am now the proud owner of one espresso brown corduroy couch:

Final verdict: It is awesome and I love it and I’m not sure I’ll be doing it again anytime soon.

And now that’s finished I can get back to knitting!  More about that tomorrow.

This was the project that dragged on forever.  Parts of it were stolen (!), then I just stuck it in the back of a drawer for a while, and then finally I dragged my feet on the embroidery.  But!  I finally finished:

Totally worth it. I love this top and I’m getting lots of wear out of it (and now that the weather is getting a little cooler I’m planning to get even more wear out of it, awesome).

I really love how the embroidery turned out, don’t you?

So as I mentioned a couple of posts back, one reason I haven’t been knitting so much lately is because I’ve been sewing.  On this:

Background: This summer, I had a friend live with me for about a month. Since she was in between accommodations, she came with furniture. I will refrain from giving a full catalog of the furnishings she brought, but one piece of note was a couch. Specifically, an orange corduroy couch. I had always thought my living room was way too small to comfortably fit two couches, but it turns out…I was wrong. Of course, then my friend (and her couch) packed up and left.

So I found this chaise lounge on craigslist. Cute, no? There’s just one problem. The color is kind of almost the same as my carpet, and combined with the off-white of the wall, it’s a little blah. So I decided it needed a new cover.

Since I don’t sew a lot, covering an entire chaise lounge (in such a way that it actually looks good) is kind of a daunting task. But, I’ve been working at it and so far things are coming along well.

I started off with a muslin mock-up:

Ultimately, I’m not sure I really needed to mock-up the whole couch. The really tricky pieces where the shape of the fabric actually matters are the front of the arm and the flat rear portion of the back. For everything else, it’s been enough to just break out a measuring tape and err on the side of caution (i.e. cut a little larger). I suppose if I really really needed to economize on fabric I would find the mock-up more handy, but actually, I think the cheapest option would be to skip most of the muslin (thus not having to buy it), and just buy an extra yard or two of cord just in case. Anyway.

For areas like the arm front, I pinned pretty carefully, and then traced with a fabric pencil the shape I actually wanted the fabric to occupy. I am really glad I bothered with the mock-up here.

After the mock-up, it was time to cut into the real fabric. SCARY. I decided to start with something relatively simple, the seat cushion area:

Painless, mostly. I am, however, discovering that maneuvering large pieces of fabric from chaise to machine and then sewing successfully takes a certain amount of patience.

Of course, the problem with doing the easy part first is that then you have to do something harder:

Like this curved business on the back. After a few tried of back and forth and ripping out from trying to use the sewing machine, I decided it would be easier to just sew this piece by hand, with everything pinned in place on the chaise. Slower, but so far the results are worth it. Here’s the back on the side with the arm:

And the front of the back:

Currently I’m working up the piping on the arm, which I’m hoping to finish this weekend:

Then there’s a little bit of edge finishing left to be done on the machine, but a lot of what’s left is also going to be by hand. Still, I’m hoping to finish it soon because right now there is corduroy all over my living room and I want to get it cleaned up!

The weather suddenly took a turn for cool here a couple of weeks ago, reminding me that I really need to get more lightweight sweaters into my wardrobe rotation.  To that end, I cast on this little number:

Navy, of course, is one of those colors that is impossible to photograph, so this will be an interesting project to blog about.  The end goal here is a fairly simple wrap sweater, with a little cable edging to keep things interesting.  I’m using a top-down raglan construction, which has the advantage of being quick and mindless–I want this sweater done and out and about soon!  The yarn is a 25% angora/75% lanbswool mix.  Soft.  Super soft.  I’m pretty sure it’s softer than a fair amount of cashmere I’ve felt over the years.  The fabric itself is fairly fine, with a gauge just a shade short of 6 sts/in.  And so far I’m loving it!

I know, it’s been a long hiatus.  The summer was pretty so-so on the knitting front: I made one cardigan (for a class, and which I failed to photograph), one bath mitt, and assorted afghan squares (but no finished afghan).  My excuses are myriad: I was travelling, I was incredibly busy with school/work, and I was just plain lazy.

Also, a lot of my crafting time in the past month has been eaten up by this:

Yes, that is a chaise lounge covered in muslin. I’ve apparently taken up sewing. A little. Just this one project. This one very large project. The eventual goal is to recover the entire thing in dark brown corduroy (the muslin is just a mockup). A goal which I’m pleased to report I’m making progress towards:

It’s been an interesting project, to say the least. More on that (and my knitting, which is picking up pace as the temperatures drop), in a later post.

So, I know, I haven’t updated much in the past month or so.  There are a couple of reasons. I was working on some projects that I couldn’t blog about, so there was that.  And I have also decided it’s time to buckle down and make some progress on the PhD, so there is less time for knitting/blogging.  But, I’m still alive and I’ve even knit some stuff!  For now, let’s reveal that I finished a mitt:

I’m teaching a class on these and the first one was last Thursday.  It was a pretty small class which I think was probably better for now.  Overall it was pretty fun and (I think, no major disasters).

Okay, I’m off to catch up on housecleaning now but I’ll try to blog sometime again in the next month