Dillinja's sophisticated pullover

Wow! A second post within a month of the last one. I must keep up with this. -Which I probably wont, but it's okay as it is meant to be my hobby blog now and therefore its for leisure not pressure (see what I did there?!).

Today I got the joy of dressing my friend's dog Dillinja up! I knitted him a pullover. Dillinja is my favourite kind of dog: Whippet. Such beautiful creature.

Here is pictures of him wearing it ever so proudly: (whippets always look kind of apologetic I want to believe. I hope he wasn't embarrassed)

Such good model, look at him changing poses

You look really stylish Dilly! Can't wait to see you trotting with that on Beech Road! You going to make all the other hipster dogs jealous ;)

Just look at this posing! He just needs a pipe, paper and slippers!

So I took the pattern from this book, which I got as a present from my boyfriends mother:

It's a nice book (slightly silly, but fun), easy patterns. Dogs jumpers are certainly easier to knit that people's, less work and can't really go wrong with the sleeve heads and sleeves as they are just holes you leave on the seams and pick up on double pointer needles after. All the shaping I needed to do was just to decrease at the top of the bottom panel.

I thought that I will kindly share the pattern with you in case you get inspired by this post. I have made a few obvious changes as you can see.

Dillinja is size L, take time to measure your dog to avoid disappointments. The book didn't really specify the yarns, but as the needle size in the pattern is 4mm and 3.75, I assumed normal DK acrylic or whatever DK you have in hand will be just fine. I used 3.25mm needles myself as my knit is quite lose and relaxed. Whatever you end up using,  knit yourself a swatch first to check gauge. 

I followed this pattern to to make the shape to correct size, but I made slight changes myself. Instead of stripes I followed a fair isle pattern (made the colours up myself from the yarns I had in my pirate crafty chest that I have in the living room, many of then just leftovers from other projects). If you choose to do the same, and will use ends of yarns, keep an eye on how much you use on the top section so you will have enough to follow the pattern through for the second piece too.

I have attached the fair isle chart on this post too, so you can see, but you can use what ever fair isle you want, just do the calculations to fit it with the rest of the pattern.

The other change I made from the pattern on the book was that instead of hood, I made Dillinja a polo neck. This was Chloe's wish (Dillinja's owner), because he has a very long neck. This was an easy change as all I did was left the stitches of the each finished piece on holder and when it came the time to start the collar, I just picked the stitches on circular needle (3mm) making sure the pieces were the right way around and started knitting (with one colour) knit 2 purl 2 rib. I didn't do any decreases since starting to knit the collar, perhaps it ended up a little bit too loose from the neck. It does look nice when it is folded over.

Here is the picture of the fair isle pattern I followed for Dilly's jumper, quite nice and simple, but with lots of colour changes looks very impressive.

Thanks for reading! And hopefully the pattern will be useful for somebody too.

Valpuri

Berlin Fashion Week

Bread and Butter

Capsule

Premium

Make Piece

I have been doing an internship now for a month for a company called Make Piece. It's a knitwear design company based in Todmorden, about half an hour on a train from Manchester Victoria. Behind the label there is two ladies: Nicola Sherlock and Beate Kubitz. Make Piece is all about sustainable UK produced luxury knitwear. All the yarns are coming from the UK, they even have their own sheep (60 shetland sheepies to be precise). They were recently on Country File on BBC One. The episode doesn't seem to be available on iPlayer anymore...

I go to Make Piece once or twice a week to work with their machines. My new favorite machine is Brother Chunky ( I can't remember now what number it is, but I am looking to buy one, so if anyone hears anything, please let me know! ). Even though working with chunky gauge machine, the garments that I have made, are knitted with fine yarn. I also work in my own studio during rest of the week to carry on practicing the designs that I learned in Make Piece studio.

The toughest thing to learn has been fixing things. When I started to use machines, I used to just do practice samples, where it didn't really matter if I just started again. In the point when I started to produce garments, I was so careful that I didn't really make any mistakes anymore (cos I didn't really exactly know how to fix it if yarn broke or I lost a stitch). It was the new way of managing the tension by hand rather than trough tension wire that got me into few blood pressuring pickles, but luckily I have gotten trough that stage where I constantly snapped the yarn. At this very minute though, there is a garment in my studio that I have to undo into a certain point. I think I haven't done the "undoing" right, as it has turned into a god forsaken mess. I did fiddle with it for nice three hours today, but when the sun started to go down, I decided to go home. I am hoping to wake up very early tomorrow to go and see if my heart is healed enough from today's struggles and I could just carry on. I have started to find my Finnish "sisu" from inside me since started this internship. (Sisu is a word or a saying about Finnish people, that they are very stubborn and don't give up, I didn't really think that I fitted in that stereotype until now). But I am there to learn and I think after a while I will be seriously good knitter.

Here is some designs by Nicola Sherlock that I have learned to knit at Make Piece: (images from www.makepiece.co.uk)


Foxglove Shrug





Edgeway Shrug



Garments on these images are not the actual garments that I made, they are just images to show which ones I have been knitting at Make Piece.

To see more of Make Piece beautiful designs go to:

www.makepiece.co.uk

They also have a blog:

http://www.makepiece.co.uk/pages/NEW-label-we-want-your-help.aspx?pageid=415

So,

Let's campaign for wool!

Kisukiskis

Valpuri

My studio

Hello!

I thought it is the time of showing what my studio looks like. I moved in there on August, and together with the girls whom I am sharing the studio with we moved a wall (!) so that we had a bigger space. Just quickly saying that the wall wasn't really like a concrete wall, it was more like, hand made wall board that was screwed onto the floor, so don't ask me to do anything like that in your houses (you probably weren't going to, anyway).

Here is my corner



And I think you have met Leila before



And here is the rest of the space, that the others use. The cutting tables, manikins and industrial sewing machines belongs to my "housemates".



I am sharing the studio with 4 other ladies, all of them has very interesting projects going on, and they are good experienced designers.

Go and see:

Sara's work in:

http://saralichouhan.com/synopsis.aspx

Consta's work in: (the website isn't working yet, but coming soon)

http://www.constanzefriedrichs.co.u

Silvia's work in:

http://www.mysewingbox.com

Silvia and Consta are also doing fashion courses, (hopefully I have a little knitting slice there somewhere) and I truly recommend that if you are thinking such things to do yourself, contact them! Believe you me, they are good! Go and see what kind of courses they offer in:

http://www.stitchcraftmanchester.co.uk

Hen is not only a dressmaker, but she is also a musician, go and listen:

http://www.myspace.com/silverclubuk

And here is a little treat at the end. This is Hen's other band Sister's of Transistors, the costumes are made by Consta and Silvia: