in the Nick of TIme...

With no time to spare... I finished my Queen Anne's Lace summer outfit this afternoon!  I plan to wear it tomorrow night to my retirement reception in Albany.  The design has been percolating for weeks in my subconscious and finally I figured out how I wanted the top to look! 

I wound up using every bit of the fabric I had woven -- how's that for planning!  I adapted the pattern from the first summer top I wove, changing the neckline and thereby added a cap sleeve.  I made the skirt out of 3 pieces of 36" long fabric woven with the white slubby linen on QAL gathered at the top on non-twisting elastic and with a 6 inch kick vent in the back.   The top was created out of the yellow fabric -- yellow cottolin on the QAL warp.  The top has a yoke that is made up of the yellow fabric cut lengthwise into 10" pieces and I added a band of the cream fabric at the bottom of the yoke.  In the front I cut it in half like the yellow and in the back I left it the 20" width.  For the bottom  I attached the yoke to the yellow fabric that I cut horizontally with the selvedges at the edge that met the yoke and the hem.  I put darts in the front at either edge.

When I tried the top on it fit well but the top gapped.  SO... I took a dart along the top edge on either panel from 2 inches down to 6 inches towards the neck at an angle.  Then I flattened it and sewed the triangle down.  This forms a nice cap sleeve.

I used French seams throughout.  The ones on the yoke seemed too wide, so I sewed a straight lines down the middle of each one.   I used a sewn stretchy zigzag on each cut edge.  Each edge, both cut and selvedge, was turned under to finish off the neck, hem and sleeve edges.

Pictures to come. 

Sock it to me...

My socks are done and I love them!  I can't wait for cooler weather when I can put them on my tootsies to warm them up.  (I'm lying... love the summer-like 80 degree weather we're having!)   

My only real problem aside from losing concentration making some mistakes that I had to frog and frogging yarn-overs are challenging, was binding off!  It took 3 tries and I finally have it loose enough that I can fit them over my instep.  I used a sewn bind-off that I found online and thanks to Ravelry postings.  (YEA Ravelry!!!) YouTube had a short video that did a great job demonstrating the technique.

What was really exciting was knowing that I can knit again.  With my Rheumatoid Arthritis the last thing I knit, last May, was a baby sweater for a dear friend... and it was agony.  Thanks to Humira (which I had to agonize over whether to start or not as it's an injection -- epi-pen) I have somewhat of a grip again and can hold knitting needles without pain.  HOORAY!

I've been working for the past two weeks on the powerpoint presentation for the program I be sharing in a few weeks a the Clayton Weaving History Conference.  My program on the research I did for my book... woven: a bauhaus memoir.  It's been fun getting back into it again.  The aethethic of the Bauhaus really resonates with me!  It's fascinating to see how the artists who taught there (Kandinsky, Klee, Itten, Albers) really influenced the designs that the Bauhausmädchen wove.  It was great getting in touch with my alter ego, Anna, whose memoir I wrote.  In order to try to experience what happened at the Bauhaus during this interesting time between WWI and WWII, I developed an alter ego for myself of a young female student.She is a composite of me and the members of the Weberei (Weaving Workshop):  Gunta Stölzl, Anni Albers, Otti Berger, and others.  Tomorrow I'll ship some of the items I wove for my thesis (where my book started) and some copies of my book that hopefully I'll be able to sell.  

I try to weave a few inches a day on the Queen Anne's lace.  I hope to get it off the loom by the end of next week as we are packing up and moving onto our sailboat up north on Lake Champlain for the summer.  No loom weaving there...  Hope to knit a Nora Gaughn sweater and do some cardboard weaving... and of course do some drawing and painting of the beautiful lake scenes surrounded by the Adirondacks on the NY side and the Green Mountains on the VT side.