Becca Made That

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.

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