Sunny pocketses

A new day, a new skirt 🙂

I wanted a new winter skirt. Plain coloured, dark, washable, comfy, with goodly large pockets.  I had a couple of metres of an unusual dark corduroy. Black base fabric. I struggle to tell whether the pile is a different colour or whether that colour is just printed over plain black cord. So dark, but with quite a sheen in greyish chocolatey colours.

I cut a simple A-line four panel skirt. Of course one needs to make the pockets first. I have a habit these days of doing patch pockets both front and back. If I ever settle on a pattern I’m happy with I might actually make proper jeans front pockets. Anyway, patch pockets on anything vaguely jean like beg for decorative stitching. I have such fun with pocket decoration. I find that gentle curves and pointed shapes are both easy to sew, while tight curves are hard to do well. What meets those restrictions, is something I haven’t done yet and appeals? I thought I’d try a rising sun motif. Et voila!

I went with a zip closure plus elastic waistband. Comfy and practical.

I couldn’t think of an appealing way to set it up for a picture by itself. They don’t make skirt hangers for larger sizes and folding the waistband like they do in the shops doesn’t make for honest display. So here it is draped on a little sofa.

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It turned out more closely fitted in the hip than I had planned but the effect is nice. I might make a looser version out of lighter weight cloth later.

One for me

Last year, as the culmination of my Alpaca goodness project I knitted a version of Joji Locatelli’s “3-colour cashmere cowl”, written up here. That was a gift for friends and I wanted one of my very own. I’ve loved the look of this pattern for ages.

I’d been fancying these colours together:

The off white is 50:50 extra fine merino and baby alpaca. I can’t remember the seller but it was bought at a fibre muster in I think Gerringong a few years ago. The blue is this yarn bought as an absolute bargain from Skeinz factory outlet in Napier NZ, which i had to figure out how to wind into a workable form and then dyed with indigo.

The caramel is left over from the Alpaca goodness project, though the small hank pictured turned out to be too thick to work with the other two but I gleaned little bits of other leftovers from mostly the same creature. I think I ended up with five different little sections of yarn spliced together to make up barely enough of the caramel element, and then had a win with the last one running out just after the end of a round and the end of a pattern repeat! Yarn chicken win!

Here is the finished cowl straight off the needles

and then blocked

and here are a couple of pics of it on. Soft and warm and interesting.