New Ventures

It has been more than a month since I updated the blog. It has been tiresomely hectic. In addition to the mundane affairs of domestic life, the summer has arrived with quite a literal bang. We are having a few problems. These problems are not unfamiliar to my compatriots, and the old readers of this blog must also be familiar with electricity load shedding . It has been the norm for the last many years and worsens during the hot weather. The new twist to this old demon, this year, has been power surges or sudden fluctuations in voltage, which have fried a number of electric appliances at our home, over the last week. Our computer and modem have had to be fixed twice in this time period, and a fan and couple of lights have required replacements. In addition to this bewildering state of affairs, is a long-going water crisis. Islamabad has been in the grips of this poorly-managed water shortage for a couple of years now. This too, has worsened with the rising temperature.

All these day-to-day stresses tend to cloud one's creativity, as one figures out a triage of washing, cleaning, cooking and laundry with the limited water, and keeps an eye out for any unusual electrical activity. Alhamdolillah ala kulli haal.

Needless to say, it is still too hot for knitting my cardigan and I find myself little inclined to start some lighter fibre project. Instead, I have been exploring some new ventures.

I have been trying my hand at handlettering. I have wanted to do this  (as well as some water color practice) for a long time and finally started last month. I have been posting some of it on my instagram.

The other thing I really went into, was jewelry-making. It has been so much fun and I made so many earrings and bracelets. Even my kids joined in the circus hobby.  I have bought some new supplies and still have many ideas to try. I will probably get a few Eid gifts out of these.

And as if beads and wire were not enough, I tried some resin craft as well. And made a load of fridge magnets. This too is very addictive and I am afraid our fridge is going to run out of display space soon. I am thinking of doing a couple with buttons, as well.

Then, it is the time of the year when I sew Eid dresses for my girls. I have started on them and hope to get a major portion done before Ramadan, inshaAllah

So you can see how our summer problems have had an adverse ( or is it perverse ? ) effect on me and spurred me onto newer crafts. 

Smaller Things

With our temperatures rapidly climbing and the weather turing unusually hot for this time of the year, I have quite lost the will to work on my cardigan. Instead, I did reorganisation of my yarn stash and decided to knit up some cotton yarns to free up some space. Two potholders and two dischcloths later, I had managed to use an equivalent of only two balls of yarn.

The potholders are crocheted while the dishcloths are knit.

Anyway, the potholders are pretty awesome and performing very well in the kitchen. The dishcloths have not been used as of now, but I can foresee their use in the near future.

I am already looking for some other small knitting or crochet project. Any ideas? 

Summer Sewing

Ramadan, our favorite month of the year, is down to its last 11 or 12 days. We had a wonderful start to the month, when we were able to sight the Ramadan crescent ourselves.

Since then, it has been all business, fasting, the suhoor (pre-dawn meal) and iftaar (the break-fast meal) and adjusting to a different sleep routine. On top of the hot June weather, we had to deal with a viral fever, which took all four kids in turn. That made the start of the month especially full.

I have had little time or inclination to do any craft work. Here I am sharing the sewing I did a couple of months ago, for my eldest daughter. These are a couple of lawn fabric tops and a dress.

The first one is a chevron print sewed into a Japanese-style top, inspiration for which abounds on pinterest.

The second top is a floral peasant blouse with raglan sleeves.

 And lastly, there is the multicolored polka-dot dress with a circle skirt. All these were my own drafts.

This summer has been very productive sewing-wise. I have sewn a lot of things, most of which do not make it to the blog. The most ambitious of  all was the sewing of Eid clothes for the girls _ glittery, shear, hard to manage fabrics, turned into cute, fun traditional dresses. I do hope to share them here after Eid.

In knitting, I have an almost done sweater front, with lace details, to share. In the next post, insha Allah.

Spring/Summer Sewing 2014 - Part 1

 This post has been a long time coming. For the last few weeks, I have been using all and any free time I could get, to sew up some dresses for my girls. But there has been so little free time and the going has been very slow. But finally I do have some stuff to blog about.
 In this post, I will show you a couple of dresses for my eldest daughter. She got to choose the fabrics and you can see she has a thing for tiny flowers and blue color. Somehow I had difficulty deciding the patterns for these dresses. Again I went with her preferences, a full gathered skirt for both, no full-circle or tiered one for her. That narrowed down the choices and made decisions easier. Both dresses are self-drafted.

 The first one has a small floral print on black background. I made a simple gathered dress with short straight sleeves. I put solid purple edging around the neck and a purple frill around the bottom and then added a few fabric flowers on the front. The fabric is a lightweight lawn, very cool for our hot summer.

The second one is again a floral print which I coordinated with a solid teal. This one has a fully lined bodice. The fabric is pure cotton.

 Blogging about them, these seem so simple and straight forward, but these took so many days to get done. I guess motherhood is finally getting in the way of my craft time :)

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Ramadan Mubarak

We, in Pakistan, have our first fast tomorrow. May Allah make this blessed month beneficial for us all!

As for my month-long absence from this blog, I was slightly under the weather. Intense heat, coupled with load-shedding and the resulting water shortages, made for a very harsh June. That seemed to sap all our energy and all we could do was wait and pray for some relief in the form of rain. We did have a premonsoon

rain spell bring some relief and now that we have had some monsoon as well, the weather has become so much pleasanter. Hopefully, it can last through the rest of summer.

This week, I have finally taken up my knitting needles again and cast on a sweater for my older daughter. I am not sure about the color my my daughter seems OK with it, so I am going ahead with it.

More Embroidery

We have been experiencing a heat wave and even though brief rain and thunder brought some respite, the temperatures are rising again. All this heat has slowed me down considerably, all I want to do is drink plenty of fluids and rest. This lethargy meant it took me nearly a month to complete this embroidery project. I have used buttonhole st in single color to embroider this lawn kameez (shirt) of mine.

Love the fabric and the sewing part went well too, so this kameez will get a lot of happy wear.

More Spring Dresses

I completed three more dresses to add to my toddler's spring-summer wardrobe. The first one was the simplest one, for which I used this tutorial. However, I was quite disappointed with the result. Just do not like the style and look of it in real life. Plus, the dull color does nothing to flatter it.

The second one was quite the opposite. I was quite uncertain about it initially, but it came out much nicer than expected. No pattern for it, per se, just put together some ideas that I had. I love this one, the color and the scallops, the pink piping and all.

No pattern again for the last one. I have memories of a orange dress with a pocket, that I had as a child. I loved that pocket, even though it was far too down to reach into, with ease. When I got this fabric, I knew it had to have a front pocket, or two!

I guess this winds up my sewing for my littlest one, this season. I am hoping to do some embroidery project in the coming days. And maybe something for my older daughter. Also I should get back to the knitting, but frankly do not have any motivation and inspiration at the moment.

Lace Grows

 

Slow and steady knitting on the stole has made it grow to about one-third the finished length ( I intend to make it quite long).

In other happenings, we are having a very hot and dry spell, with the worst-yet load shedding and an acute water shortage. The past few days have been quite miserable. We are all praying for rain.

Spring Sewing Part 2

 It has been ten days since my last post. Looking back, I know I indulged in some sort of craft activity, most of those ten days, still there is not much to show for it. I did sew a couple of my shalwar kameez but that does not make for interesting blog content. I also sewed a dress and a top for my five-year old:

Both have almost identical draft, just variation in length and placement of elastic gives different results. 

  Sadly, on the knitting front, my color work project did not go very well. I had started Dance of Robots for my son. The pattern is for 3-7 year olds and my son is eight. I was hoping to get the right size with larger needle size but my optimism was unrealistic. It makes me sad, because I quite loved the pattern.

 So I have ripped back and will start with something quite different. No color work this time, unless someone has any suggestions?

Summer Crochet Bag

Not so long ago, I saw this lovely bag on Pinterest. It looked like a great accessory for the Summer. And I had just the right cotton thread at hand to crochet it. The pattern is in Russian but there are some charts too. So armed with a Google translation and the charts, I set about making one for myself. There were a few ambiguous areas where I had to improvise and try out various options, until I got the right results, but it was totally doable.

 I used white cotton thread size 8, held doubled, on an unknown hook size. Again, our thread balls do not have yardage printed, but I used about 12 balls of local Coats Anchor Cotton Thread balls.

I did not have large enough beads for the handles, so I only dangled some smaller ones at the sides.

The lining is double, solid white cotton, with interfacing with a magnetic closure.

Thus, my quest for the right bag is finally over. I love this bag and can't wait to use it!

More Summer Sewing

I sewed another outfit for my daughter over the weekend. I'm still pretty amazed how smoothly it went. And turned out quite pretty too. The fabric is lawn again. Sorry for the poor picture quality, dying camera batteries and monsoon sky to blame.

Summer Sewing

Summer is the time when I get maximum usage out of my sewing machine. This year too, I sewed quite a few shalwar kameez suits for myself (not interesting enough to blog about). I am happy to note that while nowhere perfect, my sewing skills are surely improving. I also sewed up this dress for my daughter just before paint work started at our house.

The fabric is lawn which is our staple wear during summer, being very light and airy. I am planing on sewing another casual outfit for my daughter, inshaAllah, plus one glittery affair for Eid, inshaAllah.

Hot And Without Power

Like always, this July is also very hot and humid and like what seems always, we again are having load shedding. For those of you who are more fortunate and do not know what it means:
load shedding
the deliberate shutdown of electric power in a part or parts of a power-distribution system, generally to prevent the failure of the entire system when the demand strains the capacity of the system.
Retrieved July 12, 2009, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/load shedding

Currently we face undergo four hours without power here in Islamabad and it is even worse in some other parts of the country. To top it, our power line broke down in the early hours of Saturday morning and we were left panting and heaving with heat for the next eight hours. And of course, the complaint center had taken its phone off the hook. From experience, we know that as long the phone is "busy" the fault is still being traced and no end is in sight. And when they do answer it is usually a promise of power returning within an hour, but it rarely happens and we go back to the phone being "busy". It is a futile exercise really but being without power, we have little else to do. It is either that or running around the roof in the early hours of the day, as our neighbors seem to prefer. Only, they like our roof much better than their own.

Since then, we are back to our four hours of load shedding, but since our load has been "shifted" to another grid, the hours are changed and we only find out which when the computer goes off in the middle of some work or ... It is a miracle really that our appliances are still working.
Not to forget, there is another form of power outage of 10-15 minutes and this is also sudden and unannounced. This happens when our grid "heats up".
It is reassuring however to realize that we have come through a few years of this and what is wrong with putting up with another few!

Raspberry Lemonade is Up

After being test knitted in all the sizes (2,4,6,8,and 10 years) by some wonderful testers, the pattern for the little summer top is now up for sale at my ravelry store. The credit for the name goes to a ravelry friend.

Yarn weight: DK / 8 ply (11 wpi)

Gauge: 21 stitches and 36 rows = 4 inches in st st

Needle size: US 4 - 3.5 mm, US 2½ - 3.0 mm

Hook size: 3.5 mm (E)

Yardage: 250 - 600 yards (229 - 549 m)

Sizes available: 2 (4, 6, 8, 10) years

Finished measurements:
Chest: 24 (26, 28, 30, 32) inches
Length: 12 (14, 16, 18, 20) inches

A little Summer Top

I finished the summer top for my daughter yesterday and took some pictures of her in the top. Then I though of taking a few shots of the top lying flat. And at that moment, tragedy struck. While arranging the top for the shoot, the camera flew out of my other hand and dropped down onto the concrete floor!! Calming myself with the thought that it had not dropped from a great height, I picked it up and tried to turn it on...nope...it won't work. It made me feel worse than I even care to admit. There are times when I wish I didn't have butterfingers and DH lectured me briefly on being more careful and all, and I do try but it's so hard.
Anyway, I spent a sad night, praying for the camera to work. This morning, it did come to life and I was able to extract the photos from it but when trying to take a picture, it just shut down. Now this also happens when the batteries are exhausted so I'm hoping new batteries will make it work, inshaAllah!

Now coming to the top, I ran out of yarn, in the end and so could not make it longer. Also, had to use contrasting color for the edgings. But, all in all, it turned out quite well. The yarn (SWTC's Bamboo) looks so shiny and lovely and the color is so yummy! I might be writting a pattern soon.

And my dd is just recovering from a fever and is looking a bit off-color.

Summer Sewing

This weekend, whatever time I could find, was almost entirely dedicated to sewing. I did four projects. The first two are some more upcycling projects.
First, I turned my son's old pair of jeans into shorts.


Second project was an old pair of toddler overalls which I turned into a bag. For the handles I braided some jute rope.

The other two were newer sewing projects, a couple of dresses for my daughter.