I have been so afraid of sewing knits – I tried in the past and it did not go well. I finally mustered up the courage to try again with the Luna Tank by Helen’s Closet and it turned out so well! I had some scraps leftover and decided to push my luck by trying underwear.
I had seen the Acacia undies recommended by a few people on Instagram and it’s available for free if you sign up for Megan Neilsen’s newsletter. I figured it would be a low-risk experiment, so I broke out all of my scraps! I ended up using jersey from my tank, knit elastic from my stash, spare thread, and even scraps from tracing paper. This project turned out to be a great way to use up some of my waste 🙂
I originally made these in a size 20, based on my waist measurement. I wore them overnight and realized that they were just slightly too big. The 20 was very comfortable, but I like a snugger fit in my undies to hold up my insulin pump. I retraced the pattern for a size 18 which matched my hip measurement – much better.
I’m still getting used to sewing knits, but I am very happy with the success I had on my sewing machine and on my serger. I didn’t use a knit needle or matching thread (see above for the goal to use up scraps!) and I think it would have gone better if I had made those changes. In the pictures below you can see where my stitching didn’t catch the elastic in the front left leg.
I can’t wait to make more knit clothes – and to get some undies out of their scraps 🙂
I haven’t been feeling a lot of motivation to work on my spinning project, so we’re taking a break to look at the Yanta Overalls by Helen’s Closet.
My friend Kate keeps talking about how much she loves her overalls – so I was inspired to make my own! I spent months looking for the overall pattern. Luckily (or maybe annoyingly), overalls are very on-trend right now so there are so many to choose from! At first, I searched for something resembling the Gap’s overalls. I loved how traditional they are and was planning to make them out of denim. At first, the Jenny by Closet Core Patterns, then the Merchant and Mills Harlene Overalls were at the top of my list. But the more I looked, the more I was drawn to the looser, less traditional Yanta Overalls.
I’m not sure why I love this pattern so much – it might be the roundness at the hip, the curve from the bib to the waist… It feels wearable and funky and just… delightful!
I decided to make a muslin out of an old sheet. (Sidenote: these were some of my favorite sheets when I had a full-size bed. I love giving them new life as wearable muslins – they are also now a Woolfork Dress by Jacqueline Cieslak). I kept putting the muslin on before bed because I just loved it so much! Turns out I needed to make this a wearable garment!
The next weekend, I cut out the rest of the pieces, took the muslin apart, and started construction. It’s a very straightforward pattern with detailed instructions. The sheets were a little difficult to work with, but I made them work.
Alternations:
I graded from a 16 at the waist, to an 18 at the hips, back to 16 for the legs.
The 16 waist was too tight to get over my hips, so I tried letting out the seams, but I didn’t like the looser look. Instead, I decided to add a button to the waist on both sides.
The tushy is still a little tight, so I have three to three things to try next time: 1. change the crotch curve to a size 18; 2. grade to a size 20 in the hips; 3. increase the back rise and/or low seat adjustment.
Adding a waist button to the Yantas
I didn’t take process photos of this, but I wish I had! Oh well. Here’s how I added a button to each side of the waist – in very basic steps.
Add extra interfacing where you will be installing the buttonhole – at the front side waist.
Change the construction order – you’ll be installing the front and back facing before you sew the inseam or sides. Basically, you’ll construct the full front and back pieces before you put the garment together.
Install a small button fly (it’s more of a button tab!) on the back waist – make a small 1.5″ ish square that is interfaced and edgestitched between the back and back facing.
When you sew the side seams, sew as close to the button fly as you can.
As part of the finishing touches, edgestitch the sides to just below where the side seam starts, then sew a bar tack between the edgestitching. This will reinforce the opening.
Sew a buttonhole on the front waist and install a button on the button fly/tab thing.
Notice the edgestitching and bar tack to hold everything in place
I’m not sure if these instructions make any sense or if they will be helpful to anyone else, but this is what I did ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We’re on post 4 of this series about spinning a fleece and it’s still not time for the spinning wheel! Before we get there, we have to prep the cleaned fiber so it’s easier to spin. You can prep fiber in a couple of different ways – one of which is not prepping at all! For this project, I chose to card the fiber using a drum carder. This helps loosen up the fiber and gets it in loose alignment.
You can card fiber using hand cards – but doing so with a whole fleece takes a really long time! Instead, I like to use a drum carder which allows you to card large amounts of fiber faster. Once you’ve run your fiber through the carder a few times, you can remove it either as a bat (shown above) or you can use a little tool called a diz to create roving directly from the carder. I have varying amounts of success creating roving this way, so I decided to create bats. I ended up with 5 bats of probably 2-3oz each from this fleece.
Kt’s Drumcarder Tools
Drumcarder: I use a Handmade Standard Classic Carder and I LOVE it! It is compact, easy to store when I’m not using it, and is easy to use.
Porcupine Quill: I use this to help remove fiber from the carder and to help clean up. I also use it help remove neps from the fiber.
Awl: I use this to break the bat to remove it from the carder at the end.
Flicker card: This small hand card is used to “flick” the fiber – this helps open up the locks for carding.
Kt’s Steps for Carding Fiber
Flick the tips and ends of the locks and then pull them apart to create a fuzzy kind of fiber cloud.
Load the carder making sure to use a small amount of fiber – you want to be able to see the bed of the drumcarder under the fiber. **Overloading the carder will capture fiber on the licker (the small drum that pulls fiber onto the big drum) and it’s very annoying.
Turn the handle and let the carder do it’s thing! The fiber should be pulled under the licker and then onto the big drum.
Repeat until the big drum starts to look full, then use the flicker brush to pack the fiber down – this will help you load more fiber onto the drum.
Once the drum is full and you can only see the tops of the carder teeth, you are done! It’s time to remove the bat.
Use the awl to break the bat at the top of the drum – there should be a metal grove on your drum. Just turn the handle until that groove is sitting at the top of the drum. Run the awl along that grove for about one inch, then pull up, separating the bat. Repeat this for 1″ chunks until the entire bat is broken.
Slowly pull the bat away from the drum – you want to pull along with the angle of the teeth, towards the back of the drumcarder. This is where I start using the porcupine quill to help pull the fiber away from the bat – it doesn’t pull away smoothly by itself!
Once the bat is off the drum, separate a small piece from the bat and pull it apart so it’s a thin layer of fiber.
Load the drumcarder with this fiber and start the process again! You’ll use small sections of the bat until it is carded a second time.
You may need to repeat step 9 several times until it is nice and smooth. For this particular fleece, I carded the fiber a total of 3 times.
Step 1: pull the fiber to loosen it up
Step 2: Load the drumcarder
Step 5: a full drum!
Step 6: removing the bat
Step 8: the bat removed and ready for a second pass
Step 9: loading a small piece of the bat back onto the drumcarder
Check out this video of me carding a bat.And here is a video of me removing a bat.
Next week we’ll finally start with the spinning wheel!
Okay – in my previous post, I talked about wanting to spin my yarn using woolen techniques. I’ll put together a post to explain the difference between woolen vs. worsted in the future… but the short story is that when you are spinning a woolen yarn, the fiber doesn’t need to be strictly aligned. A woolen yarn has lots of air and is kind of… puffy? If that makes sense? When spinning a woolen yarn, you typically spin from the cloud, from the fold, or with carded fibers. Because the fibers can be in any which direction, you don’t have to be super fussy about prepping it.
So, after saying all that… I was super fussy about the way I prepped and washed this fiber. Why? Because I could!
This Romeldale fleece had a beautiful lock structure and was superrrrr greasy. I started working on this fleece in May 2019. To prep the wool for washing, I laid it out on a sheet and started sorting the wool. I picked out pieces that had too much vegetable matter (or, VM) and other, uh, goodies and separated the rest into locks that I could keep together and wool that didn’t maintain the lock structure.
When you spin a woolen yarn, you really don’t need to maintain the lock structure. However, I had never prepped fiber that way before and I wanted to try it. I bundled together groups of locks using rubber bands, then washed them using a separated lingerie bag. This is one of my favorite tools to use while washing fibers – and you can pick them up in the grocery store 🙂
When I say the fleece was greasy, that means it has lots of lanolin. Lanolin is a natural wax that is secreted by sheep skin. It helps keep the sheep wool and skin waterproof and healthy. It’s 100% okay for your skin and is actually extracted from wool to create skincare products. Washing a fleece removes the lanolin from the wool so you can work with it – whether you are spinning or felting or using it as insulation. You don’t want to remove all of the lanolin from a fleece – some people even skip washing to “spin in the grease.” Working with this particular fleece made my hands soooo soft.
When washing a fleece, you should expect to lose 25%-50% of the weight in washing. You remove the vegetable matter and removing the lanolin reduces the weight quite a bit, as well. If you don’t have a high-quality fleece, you may also lose some fiber when you prep it due to broken and weak tips.
Just a quick note – if you aren’t trying to maintain lock structure, you can do a little bit of extra prep to make sure your fleece gets clean and is easier to card. Basically, you want to open up the fleece as much as possible and there are a couple of ways to do this. 1. You can run it through a “picker” which is like a giant medieval torture device. 2. You can “flick” the ends to open them up. 3. You can pull the wool apart using just your hands. 4. I’m sure there are more ways to do this, these are the three I know off the top of my head!
Kt’s Method for Washing Fleece
Put the fiber into lingerie bags.
Cold soak: I throw the fiber into a cold water soak overnight. I try to do this all at once, in a big rubber storage bin. This removes a lot of the dirt (and any residual poo).
Hot scour: I fill a bucket with hot water (as hot as my skin can handle) and add scour (according to directions). I put in the fiber and let it sit for 15-30 minutes, dump the water, then squeeze out the excess water from the fiber.
Hot rinse: Refill the bucket with hot water (as hot as my skin can handle). I put in the fiber and let it sit for 15-30 minutes, dump the water, then squeeze out the excess water from the fiber.
If your fleece is very greasy, repeat steps 3-4 1 to 2 more times.
Repeat the hot rinse one more time.
Throw your lingerie bags into a top-loading washing machine on a spin cycle (you can also put small amounts of wool into a salad spinner).
Leave the fiber out to dry. I usually put it in a hanging mesh herb drying rack outdoors, but if it’s cold or rainy, I will put it up indoors with a fan blowing on it.
Kt’s Tips and Tricks for Washing Fleece
You’ll notice that I go from a big tub to a bucket – this is because it’s easier to fill a bucket with hot water and a lot easier to move it around! This does mean you can’t wash a fleece all at one time (unless it’s a small one) and you’ll need to do 3+ loads.
I use biodegradable scour and flush the water down the toilet. I used to dump it in our backyard, but my new house doesn’t have a backyard!
Original Dawn detergent is a popular choice for scour, but I’ve been using Kookaburra.
I talk about using hot water – I just use hot water straight out of the tap nowadays. In our previous house, the hot water never got that hot, so I would use an electric kettle or boil water on the stove to get the water up to temperature. I try to use water that is almost too hot to put my hand in – but you want to use water that is at least 140 degrees to melt the lanolin.
To avoid felting, DO NOT agitate!!! Ever!!!
To avoid felting, you can move from cold water to hot water, but you can’t go from hot water to cold water. That’s why my rinse baths are all hot.
Check out some process photos and photos of the washed fleece.
Spoiler alert: I only did the scour step once for this very greasy fleece. By the time I came back to start spinning this wool, it was too sticky to use! But we’ll come back to this in a later post 🙂
In my previous post, I shared my history with spinning and today I will start sharing the process of working with a raw fleece.
My typical first step is to look up the breed. The fleece I’m currently working with is a Romeldale. I bought it at the 2019 Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, which is one of my favorite annual events. I’ve since lost the info sheet that came with the fleece, but I’m pretty sure it came from California.
Romeldales are a cross between Merinos and Romneys. Merino wool is well known for being super soft and crimpy. It can have a high micron count and is appropriate for next-to-skin wear. Although it is one of the most popular breeds of sheep for yarn, I’m not a huge fan because it also doesn’t wear well. It pills! Romneys have a long staple, which makes the yarn hard-wearing, but not as soft as merino. Romeldale yarn is the best of both worlds. It is super soft and lofty (making it perfect for a woolen preparation), but also hardwearing.
Because of the loft and the fact that it’s not superfine, I decided to prepare this fleece for a woolen spin. This means that I won’t be trying super hard to keep the fibers aligned, giving it a more airy structure. My original hope was to make a sweater using this fleece… but there’s not enough of it. Whatever I end up making will be soft and cuddly.
All that being said… I made some interesting choices for my next step (washing the fleece). We’ll get into that in the next post!
This year, I decided I wanted to learn how to make pants. I started with the Arenite Pants by Sew Liberated – which are great – but I wanted something a little more trouser-like for work. That’s when I found the Chandler Trousers by Untitled Thoughts! They are the perfect combination of structured pleats in the front and elastic in the back. They look professional – but have all the comfort of “secret pajamas.”
Since I wasn’t sure how these pants would fit, I decided to make a muslin. I ended up making THREE. I kept having issues with the back, the crotch was doing weird things, and my booty is too big for how this pattern is drafted. None of these things are problems with the pattern or my body; just ways that my unique measurements differ from universal pattern blocks. This was the first time I did fit adjustments to a pattern (outside of grading between sizes) and let me tell you – there is nothing more empowering than learning about your body and how to make clothes fit!
Back of muslin 1 – still needs a low seat adjustment
Back of muslin 2 – with low seat adjustment
My waist is 39″ and my hips are 46″ so I made the size J1. Here are the adjustments I ended up making:
Flat pubis
Low seat
Add 1″ to the back rise
I made the first pair out of Ruby Star’s Chore Coat in Earth. The chore coat is a little heavy for this pattern, so I ended up using muslin for the pocket linings, front facing, and back facing to cut down on bulk. I love these pants, but the legs are a little baggier than I would like. Eventually, I plan to slim the legs out, but not today 🙂
Side view
Back view
A beautiful crotch seam
I love these pleats
Muslin pocket lining
Front and back facing in muslin
I really wanted a pair of these in a twill suiting for that traditional office look – but I also didn’t want a fabric I had to dry clean. I have a beautiful dark green wool in my fabric stash that I had been planning to use, but I don’t have enough tops to match with it. I’m trying to be more intentional about adding to my wardrobe, so I’m trying to make things I know I will wear regularly. I hunted the internet until I found a linen that had a similar look to suiting and ended up with a Robert Kaufman yarn dyed Essex in black. Because it is white linen woven with black linen, it has a great textured look.
I ended up taking about half an inch from the inseam starting and ending at my knees. Since I have thin thighs, it helped reduce some of the extra room I had in that area. I still see some bagginess in the thighs, so I may take some width away starting below the pockets to the knees in the outer seam, as well.
I love these pants because they are so versatile – I could wear these to the office, to a job interview, or to the beach. They’re also a quick sew – now that I’ve made them so many times, I can crank them out in a day. I think I might make another pair in a white/cream linen… That muslin looks AMAZING. Too bad you can see my undies :/
I went through a lot of hobbies as a kid – and my parents were always supportive. When I expressed an interest in learning how to make my own yarn, my dad went to Barnes and Nobel, found a spinning magazine, and located a store that offered lessons nearby. I started taking lessons in a tiny yarn store with a giant spinning wheel in the window. I was not a great student, but I carry those lessons with me.
I’ve moved on since those days and am a much more curious spinner! I’ve learned the difference between worsted and woolen, a couple of different art techniques, and I’ve even moved on to processing full fleeces. I might even own more than one spinning wheel… My stash is full of handspun yarns that need projects.
Orange and blue fiber on a turkish spindle
I bought a house a few years ago and lost the spinning bug in the move. Before moving, I had a few fleeces that needed washing and I decided to take care of that first. No one wants to move around sticky, dirty fleece! Unfortunately, I didn’t do a great job and my greasy fleece was still full of lanolin (not in a good way). I did a test spin and then the spinning wheel ended up in the basement. That was two years ago.
My hands started feeling the itch a few weeks ago. I broke out my greasy fleece and worked on fixing it. I scoured it an additional two times, then re-carded it on my drum carder. I’ve started spinning it and it is so soft. I’m so glad I didn’t give up on it!
In future posts, I’ll go through the process of working with my raw fleece, from cleaning to prepping the fiber to spinning and finally, knitting.
I love ash alberg’s designs – they’re clever, interesting, and fun to knit! I was so excited when they announced a new book, cwtch – and so honored when they picked me to test knit one of the shawls in the book.
I knit camhanaich, which means “early morning light” in Gaelic. It’s a gentle cable and lace pattern that creates a pattern that reminds me of my favorite emoji, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I ended up using the suggested Harrisville Designs Nightshade (in Street Light – unintentionally the same colorway as ash’s test knit!).
After waiting over a month for my yarn to arrive, I started this project in January and finished it in about a week. It took 3 skeins of yarn – I even ended up having to undo my swatch to get enough yarn!
To be honest, I’m not a shawl person but this is one of my favorite cold-weather accessories now! I kept this folded on the back of my chair through the month of April. It was so nice to snuggle up – this shawl is like a blanket for your torso.
I knit this shawl using size 7 32″ interchangeable needles. My gauge was right on – and this project was the first time I got to break out my lace blocking wires! The pattern is easy to follow and it knit up pretty quickly once I got going.
As a side note – I did order Knit Picks City Tweed DK as a backup since my Nightshades yarn took so long to arrive. I’m currently knitting szept, another pattern from cwtch, using it.
Hi, my name is Kt and by day I am a librarian based out of Maryland. By night (and weekends), I am a fiber enthusiast who is hungry to learn more.
I’ve been sewing since before I can remember, knitting since the 90s, and spinning since the early 2000s. Since 2017, I’ve challenged myself to wear at least one handmade item of clothing every day and now I’ve had a hand in about 70% of my wardrobe!
I share my day-to-day crafting on Instagram (find me @kzawodny), but am outgrowing the captions. So, here I am, blogging about my projects. Prepare to read too many details about my process and body ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Kt in her dining room, wearing Closet Core Pattern‘s Ginger Jeans and Kalle Shirt.
