My 2017 Christmas Outfit

HAPPY HOLIDAYS INTERNET FRIENDS! :D

I hope that you are all snugly and warm this holiday season with your friends/family :) I thought I would sneak this holiday themed outfit into your blog feeds right in time for Christmas Eve, a perfect blog post to read while sipping some hot chocolate (with Bailey's optional but highly recommended!) 

Today I'm sharing with you my Christmas outfit, a festive Galloway sweater and matching large plaid Arum dress. Let's start with the Galloway shall we? 

I was smitten with this pattern the moment it came out in the latest wool people and I knew that it was going to be my Christmas sweater this year. I have never done such an ambitious colour work project before (or any pattern with a steek!) so I was a bit hesitant but it's soooo pretty that I had to try this pattern out. Even though I knew I wanted this cardigan for Christmas I was still a little stumped for colour choices, I wanted to do justice to incredible colour work. Luckily for me Jared included several colour suggestions which made life much easier for a newbie to colour work :D I was lucky enough to snag some Brooklyn Tweed Shelter from Beehive Wool Shop during Knit City this year (they brought over a huge tote bag of yarn for me from Victoria!). The colours I used were Storm Cloud for the main body colour (7 skeins) , Cinnabar (1 skein), Fossil (1 skein), and Long Johns (1 skein). I even had enough of the storm cloud and fossil colour ways left over to make myself a pixel hat with a massive faux fur pompom which you can see in the images below :D

I knit size 38 and shortened the torso by about an 1". I did this by removing one full ten row repeat of the body lice pattern and redistributing the decreases evenly across the remaining repeats. Overall I think this cardigan fits really well size wise, the knitted fabric with shelter has a nice drape, stiff enough to hang nicely open but not so stiff as to not have any movement. It's a very cozy, relaxed cardigan, perfect for siting around a fire with friends or family or wearing under a warm jacket to go the Christmas market or skating :) The only thing that I think I would change, if I could, in a future one would be to narrow the sleeves a smidgen, they are bit baggy on me. However I have no idea where you would even begin with the math to make that a possibility! I even had enough of the storm cloud and fossil colour ways to make myself a pixel hat with a massive faux fur pompom which you can see in the images below :D

If you've been on my Instagram you'll know that I actually knit the yoke of this cardigan twice! I inadvertently cast off the wrong number of stitches for the underarm which resulted in my counts being completely off for the entire yoke and I didn't notice until I was almost done :( (this is what happens when you knit while watching season 2 of stranger things!) But I'm really glad that I took the time to unpick everything and re-knit it because the end result is fabulous. It also meant that I go really good at colour knitting, I was even able to teach myself how to hold strands of yarn in each hand and knit continental style! There were a few puckers here and there, mostly where stitches were slipped from rows below in order to avoid three stranded knitting, but these all blocked out making a nice smooth fabric :D

I'm still drooling over this colour work

I hadn't knit with shelter until now, but as with all of the Brooklyn Tweed yarns it was a dream to knit with and the resulting fabric feels amazing to wear, warm but not bulky and not heavy, and I adore seeing the little flecks of colour that make up each colour way in the yarn. I haven't included pictures of me cutting the steek because no one needs knitting induced anxiety on Christmas Eve but suffice to say that it was a nerve racking experience :S but also kind of exciting because it meant I was super close to wearing the finished cardigan! To fit with the Christmas colours, I finished the seek with some velvet red ribbon which you can kind of see peeking in some of the above photos. I'm now offically a steek knitting/cutting master!

Moving along to my Aurm dress! I got this fabric last year from Caroline at BlackBird fabrics during a pop up shop she had in Vancouver. I actually sewed this dress last year but never got around to posting about it, even though I've worn it a bunch! It works for both formal and informal functions and it's super comfy! 

The Aurm dress is a simple, shift dress pattern with flattering back shaping which helps avoid any of the lower back pooling of fabric some shift dresses have. I love the over sized plaid print of this fabric, and I think it goes really well with the simple lines of the Arum dress. Due to the large print, however, I did have to be cognizant of the pattern placement when I was cutting out the dress. I wanted to match up the lines of the plaid as much as possible to ensure consistency, and in the end I think I did a pretty good job! :D I cut a straight size 40, with the only alterations being my usual short person adjustment of about 2.5", and everything fits great! I may make the sleeves a smidgen looser in future makes since there are a bit tight on my biceps (I've been working out yo!) but other than that this is definitely a simple dress pattern that I will be turning back to time and again.

Look at that plaid matching!

That's it for this post! I hope to have one more blog post for your guys before 2017 is done! I hope that you guys are having an amazing holiday season! 

Much love friends!

-Becca & the fluffy blond monster 

Maylebone Cardigan.....in DC!

Hi friends!

Lots of knitting posts lately but that's to be expected with the cool fall weather... it's the best time to bust out all the knitwear I've been making all year :D This post is a throw back to a project I finished waaaayyy back in Febuary of this year but never got around to posting (Although it saw a fair bit of action during #MeMadeMay if you travel back in time to those posts!) I first saw Marylebone, by the amazing Bristol Ivy, when it published in May of 2016, and while the accompanying pictures certainly gave off a spring/summer vibe this is definitely a cold weather sweater my friends! I had always wanted to try out knitting with Quarry yarn but the price tag always scared me away...After visiting my local yarn shop and sourcing a few alternative options and price points I put this project on hold until January of this year when my semi-local yarn shop (I mean Victoria is a kind of local to Vancouver no? it's only a ferry ride away), Beehive Wool Shop, had a sale and since they are one of the few Canadian retailers for Brooklyn Tweed it put Quarry back in my price point and directly into my shopping cart! Funny story, I had tried to purchase the yarn from their website but it wasn't working with the sale discount so I gave the lovely ladies at Beehive a call but they were so inundated with customers because of the sale they couldn't confirm if they had enough skeins left of the Moonstone colour way so they agreed to honor the sale price for me when they called back the following day. It so happened that we were going snowshoeing the following day, but I figured they would probably call early so I wasn't worried. Turns out they were a bit busy in the morning re-setting from the sale (duh!) so they didn't call back until we were half-way up Hollyburn mountain. So there I was reciting my credit card in the middle of a snow covered forest, having paused our trek half way up a mountain, while fully equipped with snowshoes/winter gear/crazy-carpet/hot chocolate & Bailey's for the top, just to get my hands on some coveted yarn.....and this is when I knew I was a crazy yarn lady (: 

If you've been lurking my Instagram you've probably seen the in progress picture below from some time around January or February of this year. So much cable love in this picture!

Let me tell you guys that knitting with Quarry is a different experience! Like Brooklyn Tweed's other offerings, Quarry feels lighter than other yarns of a similar yarn weight, but it has a different kind of feel almost like there's a slight 'roughness' mixed with a slight residue that, while not unpleasant, left me concerned for the final product. However, after blocking this yarn really changes, it becomes super soft and 'airy', any residue that may have been on the yarn from the manufacturing process was completely gone. I really, really, REALLY love how final finished knitted fabric feels and how it drapes, it really is a joy to wear! Despite it's airy feel this is a very warm cardigan, to give context even though I am #ForEverCold I found myself wearing Marylebone as a spring/fall jacket this year with either a short sleeved top (the Kale shirt below) or a thin long sleeve and I was toasty warm. I'll have to be careful in the future....I can totally see myself knitting #AllTheBulkyWeightSweaters in Quarry and living a cocoon of knit wear in my living room with tea provided by the #fluffyblondemonster (I can literally hear his brain re-calculating why are deciding to get married from both a financial and a 'why would I want to marry this crazy person' perspective.....)

I May have a crazy yarn lady brain, but at least I'm warm! Also, can we take a moment to appreciate the cabling on the sleeves? I think they look stunning in this pattern.

I finally got a chance to take some 'blog pictures', as I call them, while in DC last week for a conference.....I swindled my poor co-worker into playing photographer while we walked from the Washington Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial since I forgot my trusty tripod and remote shutter at home (and no I don't mean the #fluffyblondemonster although he does quite often act as my photographer....again, I can hear him re-thinking this whole marriage thing...). Luckily for me, since we were at a super touristy spot, I didn't feel totally awkward taking photos like I usually do :)

Like I mentioned above, this cardigan works great as a jacket for a crisp fall day, especially if you'll be doing a TON of walking (it's hard to judge perspective for distance between all these monuments...and I had run out of US data for my phone so I couldn't consult google). You may notice that my version of Marylebone is lacking a few key features, namely the pockets and the buttons. I actually have both buttons and pockets but they never made it onto the final cardigan. The buttons because I bought grey buttons from Dressew that matched the Moonstone colour way much too closely, I went back to Dressew to get new ones and accidentally bought more of the exact same type....so I now have 10 of these buttons (one of which doesn't even have the holes to sew it on drilled in....). The pockets were left off because I coudln't decided if I wanted/needed them on this cardigan or not....since it's been knocking about for 9 months without the pockets I think it's safe to say that they will stay as swatches in my sweater drawer for the imminent future.

Also pictured is my blue crazy stripped Kale shirt and my black ginger jeans #MeMadeEveryDay

Let's take a moment to appreciate the cables on this pattern shall we? They are the defining feature of this cardigan, the cables mirror along all sides of the piece; along the front button band, the sleeves, and along the spine. Now, you may have noticed that the back cable has this beautiful tapering that really adds to the overall design as it merges at the top with the sleeves. Because of the tapering nature of this cable work I couldn't even begin to fathom how to shorten this pattern for my short self. In the end I decided to just go with it and knit it as written for the body and I think it worked out pretty great to be honest. The hem hits just under my bum, which is similar to how it looks on the pattern model, which is my go to method for determining if something fits after a life time of wearing clothes that were too big....I ask myself 'where on the body should this hem hit on a regularly heighted human?'. In this instance I think I just kind of lucked out that it ended up being a good fit length wise, it was meant to be I suppose! :D  I ended up going a bit smaller on the recommended ease, I have 2" of easy with the size 38 vs the 3-6" recommended int the pattern, but this was mostly because I knew I would probably never button it up (well I can't since I don't have buttons but I didn't know that when I was choosing my size), I also I did shorten the sleeves by about an inch but that was easy since the cabling was a consistent width for the entire sleeve. Another small alteration point I would like to make here is about the joining of the spine cables with the sleeve/shoulder cables at the back, there is a slight gap when all is said and done that I didn't really mind when it was all finished but has gotten a bit bigger with wear, so I've use a bit of leftover yarn to seal it up. It's just the nature of how the cables all come together at the end, and it's a simple fix,  but I thought I should mention it in case anyone else notices the same issue.

All in all I really love my Marylebone :D both as a light jacket and as a nice warm cardigan for winter! In terms of wear and tear, despite the 'loosely spun nature' of the yarn (direct words from the manufacture here!) I think it's going to hold up really well for years to come! More fall and winter knitting (and sewing!!!) coming at you guys soon!