No Sewing....But Thoughtful Design Work

We had a pipe burst January 25th.  Since then, we had dry wall and floors ripped out, baseboards taken out, and half of our belongings are stacked in bedrooms, bookshelves, and floors.  My studio is stacked in piles in the kitchen, the hallway, my sewing room, the bedroom.  My loom sits in the floor in the living room, which isn't all bad, since I have plenty of room.  However, things are just a mess.  Finally, this week after lots of wrangling with the insurance company, getting lots of quotes from contractors, and finalizing numbers with the insurance company we are getting the drywall repaired.  Who knows when the flooring will be in.... I am looking forward to putting everything back in its rightful place.

In the meantime, I try to sneak in a bit of knitting in the evenings when I finally get into bed.  The last couple of weeks there has not been much knitting.  Soccer practice starts at 6, so by the time I get home from dropping off in town, back to the farm to feed animals, and then cook dinner and clean the kitchen, there is not much time to knit.  I do get the odd moment in the car waiting.....

But, sewing is out of the question right now.  My sewing room is a mess, but I look forward to starting back soon.  I have lots of projects I am considering and two commissions for coats.  So as I drive around taking kids hither and thither, and running errands, this gorgeous coat by L'Wren Scott is certainly starting the thought process for some interesting designs.

The Metro Coat

I took photos of this coat after I finished it, but failed to get everything up to the blog.  So, after 1 1/2 years, here is my finished Metro Coat.  I knit sweaters using my own patterns and using bought patterns.  For this sweater, I used a pattern from a book called Swing, Swagger and Drape by Jane Slicer-Smith.

Our local yarn shop, The Needle Lady, brought in Jane Slicer-Smith, an Australian knitter,  a couple of years ago to give a series of workshops.  I attended one on fitting.  It is only the second knitting class that I have ever attended, and it was well worth it.  Jane is a master at fitting sweaters, something that has always been hit or miss with for me.  She brought a huge selection of sweaters to try to see which ones we liked and how they fit us.  It was great fun to try on all these beautiful sweaters.  I love the one on the cover of the book and will definitely knit it one of these days, but I started with the Metro Coat because I felt I needed to start using up some of my stash.  I had a lot of the light grey silk/wool yarn in my stash, so I then chose colors to go with it.

The colors I chose were a tweeded black, dark grey and camel and used green and bright blue as the accent colors.  I started the coat, but the going was very slow.  Then, I had a major back injury.  I herniated a disk in my back and was unable even to stand up for more than a week.  Even then, I could only stand up for very short periods of time without severe pain.  Once I got through the worst pain and was able to get off the very strong pain killers, I was still bed bound for 3 weeks.  So once I could sit slightly propped up, I started knitting.

This coat is not hard to knit, but does require some attention to pattern.  This is the first sweater that I have knit that has used bobbles.  My first attempts were not so successful, but I got the hang of it.  Mainly, it was a challenge managing all of the intarsia strings and untangling them periodically, but otherwise, it is a pretty straightforward project.  

Because it is such a big coat, I decided to line it to hide all the color changes and to help hold its shape.  I picked a beautiful cotton fabric for the main lining, and used a slick rayon for the sleeves to help get them on and off easily.  I covered the seam in a velvet ribbon.  

Here is a photo of the back of the sweater, and one with me wearing it.  It is quite warm and works well for 40'ish type temperatures.  I get lots of compliments on the sweater, and often have people stop me to comment on it and to ask where they can get one like it.  I love this sweater and I am tempted to do another one but shorter.  However, life is too short to knit the same thing twice, so I think I am off to do a different project now.