Stabby Stitching

Many moons ago, I started to make a tunic from Alabama Studio Style. Sometimes it's hard not to get all swept up in a book when you're editing it. I started working on this second book by Alabama Chanin at a later phase in the editorial process, when the headaches had been mostly dealt with, the icky questions had been answered, and photography was in place. It was my job to read through the book with a fresh set of eyes and make sure things made sense. It's sort of fun coming in at the late stage because you catch little things and feel pretty smart. But also, it's in good shape so you're not all stressed out about it, and therefore you have a little bit of brain space left to dream and drool. By the time I got to the end of it, I was ready to hand-stitch my whole wardrobe, make pickles from scratch, and move to Florence, Alabama. I also had a peculiar hankering for coconut cupcakes.


What I decided to do was make the Camisole Tunic, but without the swirls. I know, I know, the swirls are exciting...but I wasn't feeling very swirly that day! The beauty of hand-stitching your very own Alabama Chanin tunic, however, is that you can add on to it later. Want a beaded hem a few months down the road? Go for it! Suddenly feel you need some applique? Why not?!

When the mood strikes to make something, you just reach for the materials you have at hand and go for it. On that night last spring, I didn't have any proper pattern paper at my house (ahem...I still don't), so I used wax paper instead. I just traced the pattern onto my wax paper with a Sharpie and cut 'em out with scissors....actually, the wax sorta worked as a lube, so the scissors slid through the paper in a very satisfying way. Was that TMI?

The patterns then hung on the wall in my craft room for awhile, right between the bulletin board and a shelf. I never know what to do with my pattern pieces. I hate folding them up because the crease makes it hard to lay on the fabric when you're cutting it out, so I like to just stick a push pin through all the pieces and tack them to the wall. Does anybody else do this? Is this extraordinarily weird and silly?

I eventually got around to cutting out the fabric pieces, and then just last weekend, I actually started stitching them together. Can you believe it? Usually when something goes unfinished that long in my house, it's dead in the water. But I did it! Well, most of it anyway!

What I love best about hand-sewing is that my stitches look terrible. I mean, really really awful. Primitive, actually. Look at how uneven they are! Was I angry? Distracted? It looks like I was stabbing the fabric with my eyes closed! I mean, just look at this section, above, where I got off track and started sewing in the open spaces instead of parallel to the existing stitches. But did I go back and fix it? Nope! For this type of garment, it's just not necessary. In fact, I sort of kind of believe that it looks even better when it's off.

As of today, I now have the front and back of my lovely tunic finished, and I just need to sew them together. So satisfying! This is truly a weekend project! (Well, a weekend plus about ten months.)

P.S.: Note that in the photo above, I am only wearing the front side of the garment. To pin it to myself, I used these red flower hair clips and snapped them onto a tank top underneath. Know where else I wore these red flower hair clips? My wedding.

Isn't it fun to see what people do with treasured heirlooms after their special day?

Dandy vs. Manly Sketches

Friends and fellow knitters, I am writing to you from TNNA! The National Needlearts Association's winter gathering in Long Beach. I took a plane to get there (obvs), and that plane flew over Colorado, which was pretty. When I was not looking out the window, I decided to make some headway on Robb's new sweater! And seeing as I promised you updates on said sweater, with this post you can hereby consider yourselves updated.

Robb has put a lot of thought into what he wants. He would like a cardigan. He does not want fancy stitching. He would like the fabric to be tight knit, but not stiff. He picked the yarn and insists on a zipper even after I showed him the one other zipper I've ever installed in my life (a real massacre). All of that being said, there was no one pattern out there that covered all of these bases, so I've had to venture out on my own...I'm writing my own pattern, people! Let the 2011 knitting challenges begin!

The one thing we couldn't decide on was whether or not the sleeves should be set-in (as shown above) or raglan (as shown below). I thought the baseball-jersey style raglan sleeve would be "cute" on my man, but when I sketched it out, I found myself thinking it looked more "dandy" than cute. Granted, it could just be the way I drew it...the raglan man has a little more sass, don't you think? As a deciding factor, I went through all of Robb's sweaters and realized he doesn't own a single raglan...case closed, the boy seems to know what he likes. Set-in-sleeve ho!


I've decided to follow the top-down set-in-sleeve formula in 10 Easy Steps from Wendy Bernard's Custom Knits. To do this, you have to start by taking some fancy-sounding measurements. Then you need to figure out how much ease you want to add. (In other words, how baggy or fitting you want it to be.)

Then you knit a swatch, figure out your gauge and you're ready to go! Oh, except you have to do some math to figure out, you know, how many stitches should be on your needles at a given time. To be honest, this math is NOT HARD. It just looks hard in the photo below because I made a mistake: I didn't add any ease to the crossback measurement. I sent Wendy an email the next day to confirm I'd made an error, and she informed me that yeah, it might look a little weird. The actual quote was that it would look "like a woman's sweater with room for boobs." Since Robb probably does not want a woman's sweater with room for boobs, I ripped out everything and cast on again.

Despite having to start over, I'm very much enjoying this experience so far! Somehow graph paper always makes me feel smart. It's like, whoa now, time to roll up the sleeves...she's sketching something on graph paper. And despite my constant eff-ups, I continue to sketch the pattern in pen. Call me confident (I guess?).

Well, hope you've enjoyed the man sweater update. I'm off to eat something deep-fried now... have a beer, maybe watch a ridiculous girly movie that I would probably never watch at home. I love business trips! Particularly knitting-related ones.

Holiday Head Gear

There's so much to write about after Christmas! All those crappy crafts I made for people...I can finally write about them! I can write about the ones I received, too!

But as I clicked through my photos from last week in California, a different theme began to emerge: people in my family like to put a lot of stuff on their heads. Have we always done this? Have I ever realized this before? I don't know! But this year, we sure outdid ourselves.

On Christmas Eve, we had something like 14 people come over to eat homemade pizza. Somehow over the last decade or so, it has become tradition to give everyone those poppers (or "snappers," as Mom likes to call them) where you pull the ends of the tube and a paper hat comes flying out. I think these are typically done on New Year's Eve, but somehow that fine point has been lost at our house. Up above are Mom (in the middle) and Aunts Ginny and Cheryl on either side. They know how to work the crown!

Here's Dad, who maybe doesn't know how to work the crown quite as well as mom and the aunts. Do you think it might be just a smidge too small?


Here's me and Robb and cousin Kiera.

And here's Erin with her friend Lena--Erin was so hardcore, she wore her hat until it was time to go to bed! (I won't mention how late that was...it was very late.)

Even the Pope wore a hat on Christmas Eve!

Christmas day was full of hats, too! Here's Robb wearing the faux fur hat my mom bought for ME. It was too big, so Robb gets it. I like that it has a chin strap. (For safety, I'm sure.)

There was the knitted beard that I bought for my Dad from Five O'Clock Shadows on Etsy!

And also some tulle that Dad used as a kerchief whilst opening his new IPod Touch.

Best of all, there were the "family hats" that Dad got for everyone that are only to be worn when visiting their future home in the mountains.
Seriously, moments after this photo was taken, Dad grabbed all of our hats and put them away. He was very serious about none of the hats going home with us.

After gift-giving, we headed over to Aunt Ginny and Uncle Chuck's for dinner, where I gave Erin her "sister hat," made from the same yarns I used in my red beret.

Erin also gave Dad's beard a whirl. Tres Willie Nelson!

And finally, at dinner we decided to adorn my head with most of the napkin rings at the table. It's sort of a holiday version of Chiquita Banana...it was also very heavy!

Whew...that's a lot of hats. I hope you've enjoyed the wrap-up of what me and my family put on our heads this year for Christmas. Hope we inspired you to put something weird on your head next time you get together with your loved ones!

Beach, Bags, Reflections, and Sunsets

Robb and I spent Christmas in Southern California with my fam...it was a longer trip than was expected, but that turned out to be just fine. Robb was supposed to head back to Brooklyn on Sunday and wound up having to stay until Wednesday...poor guy, stuck with the crazy inlaws, right? To make our delay a little more fun, I declared that Monday should be spent doing something insanely Californian. So we woke up, drove Las Virgenes Highway down to the beach, ate some seafood from a shack while heating up in the sun, then drove down to Leo Carrillo to look at the tide pools (which we couldn't find due to high tide), watch surfers, skip stones, feel the cold water wash over our feet and suck our heels deeper into the sand. As the sun set, we drove through Topanga Canyon, stopped at thrift shops, and bought Robb a brand new pair of cowboy boots from the Boot Barn in Canoga Park. That night, we ate Wood Ranch Barbeque. Not too shabby, SoCal!

On the way to the airport the next day (another failed attempt at getting back to Brooklyn), we stopped at the beach again and took photos of my new batch of HeyAllday bags! You can check them out in my Etsy shop. I know I know...I'm a terrible business person. Where were these bags during the Christmas rush? Well...I didn't quite get around to photographing them. Sorry! But you know what? I'm not gonna beat myself up about it too much. In 2010 I accomplished two creative things I've always wanted to do but have been too overwhelmed to begin: I started a blog and I started an Etsy shop. At some point in the process, it became clear to me that neither of these ventures are about money or fame. They are about me sitting down to write a couple times a week; photographing anything and everything that I find beautiful (or hilarious); putting together a collection and noticing what I am drawn to; reaching out to friends and family to show them what I've done, and sometimes even showing the world what they've done. So I missed the Christmas rush...it's the least of my worries. For now, I'm daydreaming of spring and the kerchief headbands that I want to create and the people I want to meet and more In God We Trust backyard bazaars and a trip to Mexico that will likely influence my preferred color palette for the next year. A lot to look forward to, my friends. Thanks for following along this year...so much more to come!

And finally, a sunset snap from the 23 Freeway in Thousand Oaks. The silhouette of this landscape is so familiar. I could probably draw its lines with my eyes closed.

Happy HandmadeHolidays!

Cranberry Ice Cream Cookie Sandwich

If you've ever hosted Thanksgiving, then you know that cranberry sauce is something that absolutely, no excuses, must be present on the table. However, even the greatest cranberry sauce enthusiasts only need a mere spoonful to go with their turkey. Hence, most people wind up with a disproportionatley large amount of cranberry sauce left over after T-Day dinner. If your sauce was splooged out of a can, then no love lost...straight into the trash it goes. But if your sauce was hand-crafted by your dear friend (as was the case with Julie's scrumptious cranberry sauce this year), you think twice before you toss it in the bin. And in our case, you get creative.

About two weeks after Thanksgiving, I spotted the tupperware in the back of the fridge holding said sauce, and the idea came to me in a flash: ICE CREAM! We pulled out the ice cream maker, ran to the store for heavy cream, and whipped up one of the most delectable ice cream flavors you've never had. The orange notes really came through, and the berries became like little sour cherries. Best of all, in each bite are those wintry spices like cloves and nutmeg, making this a true winter ice cream.


Since all of the Thanksgiving pies were long gone, instead we made cookies to go with the ice cream: oatmeal chocolate chip. We baked them just a minute longer than you should so they'd be nice and crispy, then piled some softened ice cream on top. Put another cookie on top, smoosh it down, and you've got yourself a mighty fine high-calorie holiday snack.


OMG, try this at home, people. For serious. And Julie, get your butt over here so I can make you one of these ASAP!!

Craft Fair Debut

So I participated in a holiday bazaar! And I WON! Okay okay, there were no "winners." But the point is, I did not at the end of the day feel like a big loser. And that is a really good thing.

The bazaar took place in the back-room studio of my friend Shana's Greenpoint shop, In God We Trust. She is such a fireball of energy and awesomeness and great taste. The epically tall walls of the studio are covered in artwork and other curious decorations, which passerbys would admire with a museum-crawl slow walk as they perused the booths. My booth was planted right next to the booth for Shana's home shop (of which I wanted to buy 90% of the inventory, including a jadeite juicer and a horse head hook, which I DID buy). I asked the guy manning the booth if Shana has minions running around the Connecticut countryside buying up all of the cool antiques for her shops, and he tells me that she pretty much does all of it herself. At around noon, I watched Shana--all 100 pounds of her--lift a table and drag it across the courtyard with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth. And then my friend Morgan tells me about the drywall she pretty much single-handedly installed in their studio when they lived together. Basically, she is a force to be reckoned with, and I was honored to be part of her energy and her clique of crafters.


I brought in my fresh-from-the-printer HeyAllday Handmade business cards, and displayed them on the cross-stitched tablecloth that Aunt Ginny and Uncle Chuck gave me and Robb as a wedding gift. We were so terrified about people spilling mulled wine on the tablecloth, however, that we just used it as a runner and gave people dirty looks if they even thought about putting down their glass.

Here was the girl serving up said mulled wine--one of my besties and the greatest bar wench of all time, Morgan. Don't you want to drink glogg served by this girl?

And here are the little grocery-list notebooks that I made at the very last minute. Never have I made something so freaking adorable and yet so poorly constructed. Basically, these are made from cardstock that I covered in glue, then smoothed fabric over. I even went to my new favorite website--This to That--so that I could find out exactly what kind of glue I should use to glue paper to fabric. And then I went home and precisely did not follow those directions. I learned the hard way that wood glue makes light fabrics turn yellow and makes fabric feel downright sharp. The notebooks became free giveaways...given with a wink and an apology. Note to self: perfect by spring.

Speaking of spring, I believe that will be the time for my tote bags to shine. Look at the palette, people! This is clearly a springtime collection. Amazingly, despite the Easter colors, I sold about half of my stock. YAY! The reception was super positive, and overall it was SUCH a fun day. The people were lovely, the offerings were incredible, and I'm now basically addicted to craft fairs.