crafts

• ravelry project page
• knitted between january 25th, 2023 and february 5th, 2023
• yarn is vidalana ascendance in limestone

even though i usually only wear triangle shaped shawls that can be tied behind the neck, this one always caught my eye when it would come up in my ravelry searches. i mean, just look at it… the designer really captured the shape of feathers so well.

eventually i came across some destash yarn on craigslist that i thought would work for this pattern. it was kinda nerve wracking, since according to the recommended yardage i wouldn’t have much wiggle room, but luckily everything worked out in the end. i was even able to eek out a couple extra rows in the feathers.

just as i thought i would before starting this project, i almost never wear this ^^; but tbh i’m alright with that. i get the mindset sometimes that my knitting needs to be wearable or useful, but i just need to remind myself that knitting can just be art too, it’s okay to make things as decoration or just because the process was enjoyable.

• ravelry project page
• crocheted between october 10th, 2023 and february 3rd, 2024
• yarn is alpaca sock blank bought of ebay and dyed by myself using rit all purpose dye in petal pink, hyacinth, neon green, and aquamarine

at the time of making this i had a bit of an obsession with gradient yarn but had trouble finding something in the exact pastel shades that i was craving, so i decided to try dying it myself. after doing a bit of research i learned that in order to get the gradient, the yarn is knit into a rectangle (aka a dye blank or sock blank) before being dyed, instead of being dyed as a skein. since i didn’t have a machine to quickly knit yarn i already had into a sock blank, and since i personally prefer not to buy new yarn, i went hunting for second-hand/destashed sock blanks. after some weeks of setting up alerts on the usual second hand sites, i finally found a good deal on a set of two sock blanks from a charity shop on ebay.

since i didn’t know the length of the yarn i received, i decided that crocheting a shawl would be the best choice since they’re usually quite flexible in deciding where to stop. i decided to dye the first blank, crochet it, and if i wanted the shawl to be bigger only then would i dye the second blank. since i’ve dyed yarn and fabric before i figured it wouldn’t be that difficult, and went ahead with my usual method of rit dye + hot water + home depot 5 gallon bucket. the seller didn’t mention what fiber the yarn was since they were unlabeled, but i could tell it was some sort of wool so i did my best not to agitate the fabric too much otherwise it would felt. dying and crocheting the first blank went without a hitch, but i felt like the shawl was a bit smaller than i would like, so i decided to dye the second one… which i guess was a mistake since even though i thought i did the same procedure to dye it, it ended up partially felted 😭 i still have no idea what happened, and at the time i was so devastated that i put the whole project away. after revisiting it some months later, i saw that the felting wasn’t as bad as i first believed and could still be unraveled and crocheted with. i think i just wanted to rid myself of the whole affair and ended up powering through the rest of the shawl within like a week.

while the pattern is called a shawl it ended up being larger than i can comfortably wear going out. also, even though i love pastel and the look of pastel clothing i just… don’t really reach for pastel clothes much. i think i’ve finally accepted the fact that i look and feel best in darker and more high-contrast clothes, and that keep my love for pastel for the other objects in my life. these days it lives on the back of my desk chair, living its life as 95% room decor and 5% lap blanket.

• ravelry project page
• knitted between february 4th, 2024 and november 6th, 2024
• main yarn from a thrifted and unraveled cardigan by max studio, black accent yarn is mainstays anti-pill acrylic

my very first top! i’m not nearly as big of a taylor swift fan now as i was when i was a kid, but i’ve loved this design since the cardigan mv came out so much that i still wanted to knit it like four years later (not enough to spend like $80 on the official merch version though 🤧).

this was also my first project to use yarn i unraveled from a commercial sweater. as much as i enjoy knitting and other fiber arts i’ve always felt sort of… guilty? i guess about making clothes from new yarn or fabric since there’s already enough clothes in the world and definitely enough clothes in my closet that it feels selfish to create demand for even more textiles, which is why like 99% of my closet is thrifted in the first place. but i came across a video of someone thrifting, deconstructing, and unraveling a thrifted sweater, and i thought well i go thrifting pretty frequently already, maybe i’ll keep my eyes peeled for something that can be unraveled too… well in my experience the vast majority of sweaters are too fine of a weight to be unraveled, but that’s okay because the time it takes to clean, unravel, and knit a whole ass new sweater is more than enough time to find another sweater that’ll work for the next project 😅

anyways, when i came across an oatmeal colored cardigan at the thrift store made from decently thick yarn, i knew it had to be this cardigan. i made some adjustments to the size of the bicep and armscye to be bigger that in hindsight i probably didn’t need to make, as the fabric has stretched out more than i expected… it’s still very cozy though.

• ravelry project page
• knitted between november 11th 2024 and december 18th 2024
• yarn from thrifted and unraveled sweaters by eddie bauer and ann taylor

my first (and so far only) sweater. i don’t really like wearing sweaters since even when it’s cold, i still can get hot easily, so i tend to prefer wearing jackets and cardigans that can easily be taken off and put on again. but when i saw this design… i just HAD to have it in my closet. i love cables and something about the cable design on this sweater… i just felt like converting it into a cardigan and only having the cable panel on the back wouldn’t do this pattern justice.

the start of this project was super overwhelming since the entire pattern is charted, so there was like a dozen pages of charts i had to figure out how to follow in what order and get used to the symbol the designer used. once i started to actually follow it though it wasn’t bad at all though, i just had to learn how to do short rows but after figuring that out (which i was intimidated by since it has a rap of being difficult for beginners in the knitting community but… it wasn’t hard at all ???) following the pattern was pretty much smooth sailing from there. i did have to restart once since after doing most of the yoke, i weighed my project and after some calculations i was pretty sure i wouldn’t have enough yarn to finish the project. by some stroke of luck when i went thrifting a few days later i found a sweater that could be unraveled in nearly the exact same shade of red as the yarn i was using, so i held one strand from each sweater to knit the final sweater.

as much as i love the outcome, if there’s one thing i would change it would be to make the torso narrower. even though there’s only like 5" or so of positive ease, the extra fabric creates folds near the raglan line when my arms are down. i know it’s in trend to knit sweaters with way more ease than that, so i didn’t expect to have that as a problem, but it doesn’t bother me enough to try to fix it. i think i could fix it by ripping back to right after the yoke split and not doing the increases at the same time as the decreases in the underarm gusset, but idek if that would work, and i don’t feel like doing alllllllllll that just to finish and still have the same problem.

• ravelry project page
• knitted between november 27th, 2024 and february 9th, 2025
• yarn from unraveled and overdyed eddie bauer cardigan and unraveled talbots sweater held double

a simple, easy knit for once… i love square/grid motifs in my clothing and a basketweave pattern is no exception. the pattern is very easy to memorize, and since the construction is just a drop shoulder with no shaping, this was a pretty brainless knit.

once again, my gauge of the final project was not even close to that of my swatch -_- the arms in particular grew like 5 whole extra centimeters. one of these days i’ll go back and shorten them…

• ravelry project page
• knitted between february 13th 2025 and march 29th 2025
• yarn from thrifted and unraveled sweaters by gap, banana republic, and woolovers

my first colorwork top! the actual colorwork part was pretty easy to memorize since the pattern is only over 6 stitches. i think the hardest part of the this project wasn’t the actual knitting of it but planning out how to convert it from a sweater into a steeked jacket/cardigan. oh, and sewing in the zipper… and unraveling three whole ass sweaters for yarn…

i’m not a big sweater person but when i saw this design i immediately fell in love with how, idk, geometric? the design was and the bold colors of the designer’s samples, even though i went with a completely different color palette. so i decided that even though i’ve only knit two tops that i could totally figure out how to make it into a cardigan. originally i thought that i could just cast on the steek stitches and call it a day but once i started i realized that shifting the start of the round from one of the raglan lines to the center front would mean i would need to redo all the instructions for the short row (aka i would need to do way more math than i had anticipated).

ultimately i think the changes i had to make to the pattern were okay. steeking (for non-knitters, this is cutting an opening in your work) wasn’t as scary as i thought it’d be - i used a needle-felted steek which i would definitely recommend to anyone else paranoid that a crochet reinforcement won’t hold. i feel like my biggest issue with this project was the fit. even though i’ve always folded it when not wearing it as opposing to using a hangar, the yoke has stretched out much more than i expected, leading the cardigan to feel like it’s slipping down my shoulders even when fully zipped up. it’s frustrating that even though i’ve read tons of tutorials on how to knit and measure gauge swatches, my final projects still act differently than how i’d expect from the gauge swatch. when the fall comes around it think i’ll attempt to reinforce the neck with some crochet slip stitches or something… since i finished this cardigan late spring when it was already warming up i hope i can find a way to get more wear out of it this fall and winter.

• ravelry project page
• knitted between april 8, 2025 and september 6, 2025
• yarn is tahki yarns donegal tweed in 851 light olive

this project started after one fateful thrift store visit, where i stumbled across seven(!!) whole, unused skeins of donegal tweed yarn in this beautiful grass green color for $8 total. since i wasn’t sure if it would be enough for a cable pattern, i stuck to a simple stockinette cardigan with subtle but sophisticated looking details i liked such as the saddle shoulders and double knitting before the neckline.

knitting this took ages… i finished the bulk of this project in the first month after i started but i swear the moment it heats up here i lose all knitting mojo. once it starts getting consistently above 75F/24C the feeling of a whole sweater in your lap stops being cozy and starts being suffocating, and yarn passing through my hands makes them all sweaty. at the end i only had one sleeve cuff to do, which took maybe 2 hours to finish, but i didn’t touch it for a whole month because it just would not stop being like 85F/29C.

now that it’s done i can’t wait to wear it, once the weather decides it wants to be consistently cool… probably my best executed sweater so far from a technical standpoint. i didn’t have as many issues with gauge as the other ones i’ve made, and it hasn’t lost all of its shape after the multiple mid-project blocks i’ve done.