Making a Roman Shade with Handwoven Fabric

I had been wanting to make a shade for a window in my house that faces west.  A lot of sun comes in every day, heating up the house, and I wanted to filter that light a little bit. The window is so narrow that it seemed silly to have curtains there, so I decided to make a Roman shade instead.  That's one of those window shades made out of fabric that pulls up like a blind, sort of, when you pull on a string.

I ordered a kit from a website called Make Roman Shades.com.  When you order the kit, you specify the dimensions of your shade--its width and length--and you receive directions and hardware specific to your very own shade. This makes it pretty easy to assemble the shade.  The directions assume you are going to use store-bought fabric and a liner, but I had woven a piece to fit that space, and I didn't want a liner because I wanted the light to filter through the lacy weave.  It wasn't hard to adapt the directions a little for one piece of handwoven fabric.

The weave is called basket weave. I'm doing a series of lace pieces for my windows, and this was the first one. Basket weave is just two weft threads crossing two warp threads, interspersed with plain weave stripes in this case, and it's a very simple lace weave.  I was trying to use up my stash of 10/2 cotton, and I used some of it in this project, but I have a lot left for future lacy curtains.

 The hardware for assembling the shade includes a piece of wood, to which you screw the pulleys and the cord thingamajig, which makes the shade stay up with a little braking device for the cords inside it. Also you get some plastic rods, which you slide inside these special Roman shade sleeves, which you sew to the back of the shade. These sleeves also allow the cords to pass through them vertically.  It's pretty cool how it all works. You screw the piece of wood to the top of the window frame. The shade attaches to the back side of the wood piece with velcro, so it's possible, theoretically, to remove the shade from the wood piece for cleaning.

The shade works exactly as it was supposed to, which is good.  And, it looks exactly like I wanted it to look: also good. But I realized after I put it together that it's going to be very hard to take it apart to clean it!  You would have to unscrew the wooden mounting board from the window frame, unstring the shade, and take out all the rods.  Maybe I can just vacuum it if it gets too dirty. But in the future, I think I'll make plain old curtains for the other windows. They can be easily taken down in winter to let more light in, and you can wash them, which seems like a good idea with light-colored curtains.

Blue Lace Handspun Socks

I just finished making a pair of socks from Anna Zilboorg's great book, Socks for Sandals and Clogs.  I love this book because of the clever patterning that she puts down the backs of the sock heels, which you can see in the picture below.  Here, the heel is folded up over the sole so you can see it.

Most socks just have a rather generic heel flap, I suppose because when you wear regular shoes, the heel flap doesn't show.  But a lot of people wear clogs and Birkenstock-type sandals nowadays, and some people wear socks with their clogs. I always wear socks with my Birki plastic clogs, because they're not very comfortable without socks. (Otherwise, the plastic pulls the little hairs on the tops of my feet and toes, which I suppose you are supposed to shave off if you're a good girl.)

I spun a wool/mohair/nylon blend for these socks, fairly tightly, and plied it balanced.  It knitted up at a gauge of about six stitches per inch on 3mm needles.

There is a lace pattern that travels down the front and back of each sock:

This pattern was sort of a challenge for me.  I had to learn how to do a raised increase.  After I learned this, the pattern became easy.  Ana Zilboorg also uses raised increases on the toe of her toe-up patterns, of which this is one.

I have ambivalent feelings about toe-up socks.  On the one hand, if you're not sure you have enough yarn to make a tall sock, you can start at the toe and just knit until you run out of half your yarn.  (Then make the other one.)  On the other hand, I don't like the fiddly cast-on for toe-up socks.  But the more times I do it, the easier it gets.

With this pair of toe-up socks, I didn't do the heel the way AZ suggests for the first sock.  I knitted a tube from toe to the top of the sock; then I inserted a plain heel.  For the second sock, I did it her way:  I knitted up to where the heel would start, put the sock aside, made a new "toe," which would actually be the heel, and grafted it onto the sole stitches, and then joined the round and away I went up the ankle. This worked marvelously well, and I admire her innovation in the "unventing" (as Elizabeth Zimmerman used to say) of this technique.  It's not traditional, but it works!

The picture below shows how the heel joins the ankle, and how it looks from the back of the sock.

Green Socks

Made of Tofutsies, a wool/cotton/bamboo/soy blend.

Feels very summery.  This pattern looks cabled, but it's really a lace pattern with decreases and yarn-overs.  It was the March Mystery Sock on Ravelry.

Monster sock

At the Ravelry sock group, we're trying to use up our left-over sock yarn before the new year begins.  Here's my second pair of left-overs sock in progress:

outfit for a little girl

I made this outfit for my niece, Libby, for Christmas.  The patterns were all from Ottobre magazine, the fall 2010 issue.  There was a cute bubble skirt with a machine-embroidered mushroom on it, a blouse with pin tucks, and a velour jacket to go with the skirt and blouse.

It was my first attempt at machine embroidery.  I put a piece of stabilizer under the fabric while I stitched the lines of the mushroom, and that helped a lot.  It was pretty easy and didn't require a fancy machine, as the only stitch required was a straight stitch.

The blouse fabric is Liberty Tana lawn. I had a blouse that I made for myself out of it, but I never wore it, so I took it apart to make a smaller blouse.

Here's the jacket on Libby:

 And on the floor:

 Blouse detail:

Skirt detail:

stashbuster socks

On Ravelry.com, there's a group called Sock Knitters Anonymous, and this month we're all trying to use up our leftover sock yarn from other projects.  I made these socks from a pattern in Anna Zilboorg's book Socks for Sandals and Clogs, called Betelgeuse.  It's an easy pattern, but the accent yarns sort of pop from the background in a good way.

Monkey Socks

The April sock challenge was to knit a Cookie A design.  Cookie A is a celebrity sock designer.  Bet you didn't know there was such a thing.

Anyway, there's a free sock pattern on Ravelry by Cookie A called Monkey.  Apparently twelve thousand and sixty-seven people have made these socks.  I found that so amazing that I made some too.  Imagine.  12,067 pairs of Monkey socks, and that's just the ones that are documented on Ravelry:  that is, there's a picture of that many pairs.  There must be thousands more that have never been photographed.

Can thousands--nay, tens of thousands--of sock knitters be wrong?  That was my reasoning when I set out to make my very own monkey socks.  Also, a sock yarn web site had just given me a skein of their space-dyed yarn to try, and Monkey socks are sort of designed for space-dyed yarn, so it seemed like a good time to try making Monkey socks.

The pattern was really easy yet not so easy that it was boring.  It is kind of lacy, and kind of stretchy.  I like the socks a lot.

The yarn, not so much. It bled like crazy when I washed it, and the bright colors faded almost immediately.  Not sure why the dyers have not figured out how to make their dye colorfast. It's not that hard.

Anyway here are the socks.