Fair Isle Jumper Finished

I started this back in January and was (as it turns out over-optimistically) hoping to have it finished for my son's birthday in May.  Sadly May came and went and I was still knitting.  I completed the body fairly quickly but the sleeves seem to take me forever!  Fair to say though that if I had been only knitting I might have managed to finish it on time but I always have lots of things going on concurrently.

Anyway, it's all knitted now and I'm just tying the gazillion ends at the moment and then I will give it a nice wash and block before finally giving it to my son.

Whalsay Jumper Design by Hazel Tindall / Ann Feitelson

The jumper looks kinda "brownish" from a distance

but it's made of many colours including

orange, purple and plum.

That's what I love about Fair Isles,

the beautiful play of all the different colours that make a design.

All those colours does mean that at the end, you have to deal with many many wool ends from all the colour changes.  However, Shetland wool has wonderful "grippy" qualities preventing it from unravelling easily and making possible also to just knot and pull off the ends.

Here's what my seam looks like with the knotted and pulled wool ends.

With washing and wearing, the ends will gradually felt into the body of the jumper.

So that's it for the Whalsay Jumper.

I'm already wondering what my next Fair Isle is going to be...

Does anybody reading this like to knit Fair Isle?

Best wishes,

Frivole

Orsi's Napoleon Re-Visit

A few weeks ago someone wrote to me asking about Orsi's Napoleon pattern.  I had made it back in 2011! (see this post).  The pattern is no longer available on Orsi's site but I contacted her and she kindly agreed to share the pattern and to let me show it here on my blog.

This is the one I made from the pattern she sent me.  I realised afterwards that some joins were missing and also some picots on the outside trefoils, if you were going to join several motifs together.  I now believe it's because the drawing she sent me was for a doily she made with this design (a small version can be seen here and a larger version here on her blog).  From her drawing, I made a new one with the small changes:

And here is a written version:

R8-4-4, R4+6-6-4, R4+4-8, rw

C3-5, JK10, rw, C10-3, rw

*R8-4-4, R4+6-6-4, R4+4-8, rw

C3+10, rw

JK10, C5+3, rw

R8+4-4, R4+6+6-4, R4+4-8, rw

C3+5, JK10, rw

C10-3, rw

Repeat from *

Here are four of them joined together

(taken from a 2011 post I'd published about this design)

If anyone decides to try it, please let me know if I've made any mistakes in the diagram or written pattern and I'm glad this lovely little square will now be available again to tatters.  Thank you Orsi!

Added 26.08.21:  Anke kindly gave us a link to Orsi's original blogpost about this pattern which contains drawings, it can be found here:  https://web.archive.org/web/20120202182128/http://spulni-blog.blogspot.com/p/mintak-patterns.html

Best wishes,

Frivole

Couture Champêtre

Following on from my previous post... another lovely thing about vintage sewing machines, manually powered, is that you can easily take them outside to do your sewing on a beautiful sunny day!

I love that.

This one is my 1937 Singer 27.

I bought it for peanuts and it's in such beautiful condition!

The decals are nearly pristine and it sews beautifully.

To go with a nice vintage machine,

it's great to also have some vintage accessories.

I found a vintage buttonholer attachment which does a fantastic job.

Look at that neat buttonhole!

Thanks for telling me about your own vintage machines in the previous post.  I'm in the process of finding a couple of replacement parts for my Frister & Rossmann and I think we're so lucky to have internet nowadays to be able to find specialised things like vintage sewing machine parts.

Happy sewing everyone!

Best wishes,

Frivole

The Delights of Vintage Sewing Machines

I love old sewing machines.  They are wonderful feats of engineering, are incredibly sturdy and hard-wearing and they look great to boot!  I have three.  I'm trying hard to be reasonable and stop there because who needs more than three sewing machines?  (Actually I have 4 as I also have a modern, electronic machine).  

What got my love story started was when I found an old Frister & Rossmann for £15 in a charity shop several years ago.  Then I bought a beautiful 1937 Singer 27 hand-crank which was in perfect condition.  And lastly I thought I really needed a treadle machine and that's my 1913 Singer 15 with oscillating shuttle.  They are all great machines and I treasure them.  

However, this blogpost is about a new machine.  My youngest daughter decided she'd like a sewing machine of her own, one she can keep and take with her when she sets up her own home.  A few weeks ago, I saw one again in a local charity shop...  I went in and turned the crank but it was really stiff and barely moved, the machine was dirty and I couldn't quite tell how well it would run.  I returned to look at it again with my daughter and after a bit more examination, she decided to purchase it.

I had not heard of this make before:  Mundlos (a German company) which was sold in the UK under the name "Royal".

It was a bit dusty and dirty... but the metal appeared in good condition everywhere.

Interestingly, it says "Foreign" on the back.

Some of the parts, caked in old oil didn't move at all.  But after a good cleaning, dusting, wiping, oiling, and spinning, it turns out this was a good buy!  Everything works on it and it's now shining and running smoothly.  It's a nice compact machine and I know it will give my daughter many good years of service (no doubt her lifetime in fact if she looks after it!).  I'm pretty sure, from looking up its serial number, that it was manufactured in 1938.

It has an interesting pattern on the metal plates which can be found on that small front plate, on the face plate and on the back one:

At some point in its life, someone had glued (I think?) a small metal pin cushion on the lid of the side container box.  Update 05.11.21:  Thanks to Anke's comment and her pointing me to a website about these machines, I now know that the pin cushion was an integral part of this machine.  They were sold like that, with that small pincushion attached to the lid of the side container.  Neat!

It had saw dust in it but had become so hard over the years that it was practically impossible to push pins into it.  The old pink velvet was also in bad condition so I removed everything and made a freshly filled pincushion to put back into the metal casing, in green.  There is it, ready to be used.

All in all a very good machine.  It has a reverse gear and even an unusual little lever to lift the bobbin up from its carrier.  It can be seen next to the bobbin winder in the main photo.

I bet there are several of you, reading this, who also own vintage machines.  I'd love to hear about them so please let me know what you have!

Best wishes,

Frivole

Back to the Collar

I'm still spinning but I finally decided to go back to the nearly finished collar.  I'm on the last round!  It shouldn't take too long to complete - come one me, get it done!

Isn't it strange how sometimes we can get most of a project completed and then somehow lose steam when there's not that much left to do.  Does it happen to you?

 Best wishes,

Frivole

Knitting My Own Wool!

I started knitting my wool!  It's exciting!  This lovely wool was on a sheep a few weeks ago and now it is becoming a sweater.  I'm knitting it for my son - who had his first experience of shearing and sheared his first two sheep - and he wanted a really plain sweater with no fancy stitches, to show off the wool he said.  I think for a first time working with my own home-spun wool, it was a good idea.

Here's some wool in the basket ready to be spun and the rustic Lazy Kate (wonder what's the origin of that name) that my son made for me for plying my singles.  It's a bit rough but it works a treat!

Several skeins of wool

waiting to be knitted...

(as I'm writing this I'm now down to the last one of that batch)

I decided to make a top-down raglan sweater which makes it easy to check for fit as you go along and am now past the armholes and making my way down the body.  It's great to just make more wool as you need it.  So I keep washing, drying, spinning, plying, winding, knitting... and... repeat!

Best wishes,

Frivole

Learning a New Skill

Tatting has taken a bit of a backseat lately.  That's because about three weeks ago, I was given two fleeces by a local farmer friend.  I'd always wanted to try to make my own wool and there was my chance!

We went to watch him shear his sheep and then I walked away with two giant bags of raw wool.

This is the raw fleece above and below is what it looks like after washing.

It's surprising how much whiter it is after one wash.

Next I needed to learn carding so I purchased myself two carders and started to learn how to make rolags.

And then on to spinning!  Sadly I do not own a spinning wheel (a dream for one day) so I started with a homemade drop spindle.  I won't show you version one which didn't work very well but version two, made with two CDs , a cork, a homemade hook and a stick works a treat!  It spins really well and I even got the hang of the "thigh roll" which makes continuous spinning easier.

I then spun two plies together to make my very first quantity of 2 ply knitting wool!

Here it is photographed on top of the raw fleece

so you can see the difference in colour.

And finally,

I knitted a tiny bag with my first small ball of wool.

From sheep to knitting.

I really enjoyed the whole process.

I've got loads to learn still but I now plan on spinning as much of the fleece as I can (some bits are not as good as others which is something I need to learn how to identify) with the goal of making a whole jumper with wool I've spun myself.  I have now purchased a very tiny electric spinning wheel to speed up the process - although I do enjoy the experience of spinning with a drop spindle.  It was the cheapest wheel I could find and also the smallest but it works very well although it does mean the bobbins are not huge so I can only make about 25-30 grams of 2 ply at a time.

I'm making progress!

My fourth skein is currently drying.  Now I need to figure out what size my wool is but I'm guessing something in between a DK and an Aran size.  There is also the difficulty of trying to be consistent when spinning so your wool is all approximately the same size... not easy!

So that's what's kept me busy lately.

Best wishes,

Frivole