I hope you all had a great Christmas! We are very grateful for all the friends and family that we got to see and spend time with. During this season, I am reminded of how blessed we are in so many ways – for our beautiful boys and the joy they bring into our lives, for our family and friends, for our country and freedoms that so many around the world do not have, for our homes, jobs and things like that. There is just so much to be thankful for! Even our hobbies like quilting and knitting – they bring an added fullness to life as well. As a person that thrives on creating and making things, I can’t imagine what life would be like without these fun things to fill up free time – limited as it is with the boys 😉
With the new year approaching, I have lots of things to think about in relation to my business. First of all, the new Vatmoss regulations are affecting us and we are having to change our shipping policy on our PDF patterns. It will mainly affect those of you living in the EU. I feel really bad about it. As Americans, we have easy access to anything quilting related and at much lower costs than those that live in other countries. This is just going to make it even harder for some of you to have easy access to quilting products. As a result, we are going to have 25% off all PDF patterns for the next two days so those of you living in the EU can purchase the PDFs you might have had your eye on for next years projects. Click here to view our PDF patterns. These regulations will not affect our paper patterns or books.
I am also thinking about business things such as this blog and what to talk about in the new year. I would like to share a few of these things in my next post, so this one doesn’t get too long. In the meantime, I have a sweater that I finished in July and I am finally getting around to blogging about it. How bad is that!
The pattern is Helene, by Veronik Avery. I loved making this. I found the lace pattern to be very enjoyable and fast. The design is so beautiful and I love the color of the yarn.
The yarn is Sparrow – Which is the same yarn that I used in the sweater from this post. It’s a linen yarn made by Quince and Co.
It’s quite thin, so it is light and works up well for summer projects and lacework.
I made several mods to the pattern – including making the sleeves narrower, I kept the back neck higher, and I added one repeat to the length of the sweater.
I wish I would have done a little something different with that bottom hem. See how the edge is a bit knobby? Anyone have any ideas on how they would have changed that? Or how I could fix it?
My main mod was that I was very unhappy with how the shoulder seam looked when done up as instructed by the pattern. It said to pick up stitches along the top of the arm and then do a three needle bind-off.
I seamed one side up as the pattern instructed with the 3 needle bind-off. Mine turned out very messy looking – as you can see below.
Here is how it looked on – and it still looked really bad. I may not have done it correctly, as mine seemed to look worse than the others on Ravelry.
I sewed the other side together without picking up any stitches or doing the three needle bind-off. I liked it much better, so I redid the other side to match. (by the way, I am very pregnant in this picture).
Everyone on Ravelry commented that this knit up very small so I knit half of the back, blocked it and made sure my gauge was good – but maybe when I reblocked it, I stretched it too much, because it turned out pretty large. Maybe I will wash and dry it??? Do I dare?
Does anyone else have any experience with washing and drying linen? I don’t want to ruin my sweater. Feel free to share any thoughts on this in the comments. You can find my Ravelry link to this project here.
Thanks for stopping and Have Happy New Year!
Trends and Traditions 