Avocado Carnaby -- Finishing touches

It's done! It's done! I love the drape of blocked wool. It just hangs straight off of your hand all relaxed and happy. There is no fighting with it to lie still or tussling over sides that don't quite match up. Those were my thoughts as I pulled the blocking wires out of the skirt this morning.

 I grabbed the buttons and got to work.  Now, I know most of you have sewn a million buttons on things; so have I in my lifetime. But there is a difference to sewing buttons on to a knitted item as opposed to most woven fabric.

With these buttons, using regular thread would have taken forever, so I split the 4 ply worsted weight yarn I used into two sets of two ply and threaded a small yarn needle.

I then doubled the yarn over and tied a knot at the end. This is really important for an upcoming step.

If you line up the two sides with the button hole on top, you can mark the placement of the button by sticking your needle straight into button hole.

Holding the needle, pull back the buttonhole side and look at the placement of the needle. This is where you want your button to be centered.

One difficulty with sewing into knitted fabric is that there are so many holes! So one of the tricks that I learned many years ago is: When you go up and then down through the button's holes for the first time slip the needle through the loop formed by the two legs of the yarn. This will anchor the end of the yarn with the button itself so that it won't come loose.

It only takes a few passes with the yarn to fill up the big holes in the button. Try sewing on 7 of these with plain thread!

Make sure that the direction of the threads through the button holes all go the same way. It would look really funny if some were horizontal and some were vertical. I don't think it matters which way they go as long as they are consistent.

Happy Knitting!

Hypotenuse finished!

I told you in my last post, that this skirt was über easy to knit. It was almost too easy. So easy that I made two mistakes.

1. I didn't pay really close attention to the stitch count. Oops! When I got to the end, I ended up with one more "ridge" than I had on the beginning row. I didn't even notice it until I started to block it. The one corner was a little loose and floppy. When I got it off the blocking wires it looked pretty good, then I started to sew up the seam and I found that I was off by one ridge.

2, The skirt also ended up about 2 inches longer than what I was aiming to get. I had thought about raveling back a few rows and re-knitting the corner, but that was not going to fix the length -- that would only be fixed by raveling back about 75% of the knitting. And that was NOT going to happen.

So instead of picking up and knitting on a waistband, which would have given it even more length, I decided to fold over the top and form a pocket for the elastic. This basically solved both problems! The skirt is a little bulky around the waist, but I wore it with a blouse that covered that up.

I wore the skirt to work yesterday. It is light weight, comfortable giving easily when bending over or stooping. On my mile walk from the office to the train it was about 78 degrees yesterday afternoon and I was not too warm. I received several compliments which is always nice!

I am already thinking about knitting another Lanesplitter. But I have another couple of projects to finish first and then there is another skirt that I saw and might like to try: The Paint Chip Skirt. Yum!

Happy Knitting.