Sewing for the wedding

I did get to spend a little time sewing before Laurie's Wedding. I bought most of my outfit from my belly dance studio and from renaissance festival last year, but I needed a chemise of some sort to wear underneath the small corset, lest I show my lovely stomach the entire time. I love to belly dance, but we cover up after we dance, so wearing the corset sans chemise was not really something appealing to me. I went to Jo-ann's and bought a yard of cotton fabric, which I thought would be enough for a little shirt. Well, when it came down to it, there wouldn't be enough fabric for sleeves, so I kinda designed something sleeveless that still covered everything necessary for the event.

Basically I decided to use a tutorial I had used before for circle skirts and make the fabric square and put a circle in the middle of it:

After figuring out how wide I wanted the hole to be, I just folded the square fabric twice and laid a piece of paper with the outline of the quartered circle on top. Using some fabric chalk, I traced the circle and cut. I added a strip of leftover fabric from a previous project and some that was left over after making this fabric square to the circle to create a ruffle effect by using a simple drawstring.

I think it turned out rather nicely with the rest of the costume (which included the solomon's knot shawl -- not particularly visible in any pictures, but hey, if you were there it looked nice!)

Here's a picture of myself and the bride -- my lovely friend Laurie who I've known since high school: 

My first sweater... and a few other things

So, after finishing some of the smaller projects I have been working on, I decided a little while ago to finally get down to making an actual garment. I decided to use up my small stash of Lion Brand Thick and Quick in Claret. The sweater took about a week to complete, since the yarn was so bulky, and I really enjoyed working the horseshoe lace pattern. Here's a picture of the finished sweater:

I think I may give this to my mother if it fits her well. It's a beautiful sweater, but the color doesn't look that awesome on me seeing as I have red hair and incredibly pale skin. My mom, on the other hand, has a bit darker skin than me and brownish-blonde hair, so this dark red color would look really nice on her.

I have also managed to finish up a few more things over the past month. I finished up the Wine Pathways Hat from Once Upon a Time:

Also not the greatest color on me, but for some reason I do have a lot of red yarn in the stash. That's probably because my family looks good in red and/or likes the color -- my dad certainly does! That's the color of his truck and uniforms at the place he owns.

The Chestnut Windsor Warmer and Solomon's knot shawl also can be added to my list of FO's for the year. The little cowl will also likely be a gift for someone, though I used the shawl for part of my costume for my dear friend's renaissance themed wedding.

The Windsor warmer was done at half the length recommended in the book (125 sts instead of 244 sts), mostly because I only had a little yarn left in my stash to do the project.

The shawl was worked by chaining 42 solomon's knots, and working in a triangular pattern until, well, I ran out of yarn. This created a kind of trapezoidal shawl since there wasn't enough yarn to make a complete triangle, but it will work for a beach or belly dance wrap!

Updates

So apparently I have been knitting more than I have been blogging. So here it goes: Over the past month, I've managed to get several projects finished, so I'll probably try to spread it all out over a few posts instead of putting them all in one.

After finishing the shrug, I was able to finish up two regular guy hats, which is only half way through the hats I need to make since I gave one to my store manager, Cody, who left us to go to Cartersville during a random changing of the management that occasionally happens at work. Here's him enjoying showing off his new hat:

The other one was shipped to Travis, my brother-in-law who lives in upper New York state. I really like the hat pattern. It is very simple, and a great "brought this in my purse to work on it during lunch" project. Though, after making two of them, I'm going to move on to a different pattern. I still have to make a hat for Lee at least, thought there will be enough yarn to make probably about two more hats, so I may as well! I also LOVE the yarn -- Lion Brand Wool-ease -- very soft and springy.

I also was able to finish up my first knitted shawl, Autumn flies. I really like the color, but it did end up really small. The pattern was very simple, each like written out individually, so it was really easy to understand. I did have to bind off a few rows short, though they were just stockinette rows. Even cutting the pattern a little short, I ran out of yarn only a few stitches from the end, and used another type of yarn in a very similar color to finish up the bind off -- Yes, bask in the glory of my willpower to NOT buy more yarn to finish up the last 10 stitches of a project ;-). Huzzah!