I'm knitting once more! The Pouf pullover

So, the item I started on my 2018 Make Nine list is the one that ended up being the last one to get completed. Yeah...how about that?

I started this pullover around new year last year, chose it because it was cool but mainly because it was a simple knit and given my lack of experience, I needed the practice...or rather, I wanted the practice because I wanted to learn to knit.

The whole thing started with me being in Antwerp, Belgium beginning of December last year and wanting to bring back a piece of fabric. I went around a few shops and didn't find anything appealing enough that I just had to have (and I thought the struggle was only here in Norway...), so I started looking at yarn, you know...because I wanted to improve my knitting skills.

I found this fluffy bouncy merino wool in the nicest color. It looks like powder pink but when you look a bit closer you see it has flecks of many colors in there too. Lovely!

Then I started knitting...As I was working on the bottom ribbing, it looked really small, so I did some measurements and decided to increase the number of stitches by a third...which looked OK until I finished and tried the thing on...Oh! the horror 😱! The thing ended up being quite heavy and big that it pulled itself down making it look like it was melting down! The high neck was non existent and the hem reached my knees! I even washed it at high temperature and the thing refused to shrink. There was no way I'll be wearing this!

So do I throw it into a dark corner and forget about it for a while? That wouldn't really be me now, would it? 😁 So I took a deep breath and unraveled the whole thing, then threw it in a dark corner 😂😂😂. But I did pick it up again, and started over. This time not deviating at all from the pattern and guess what? It worked! It looks really close to the pattern photo and I'm really pleased with it.

It's delightful to wear, it's warm, it's cozy, it's just great! Is it perfect? No, far from that. It looks unevenly knitted, it does...and I'm really hoping some wear and tear will even that out a bit. The chunky wool proved not to be the easiest thing to knit prettily with for a beginner like me, but I still love it 😍. And guess what? I'm knitting something new right now. Far more involved but it seems to be going surprisingly well (fingers crossed).

This concludes my 2018 Make Nine list! I made them all! But will I do 2019 Make Nine? No. This was far too restrictive for me who sews for fun, changes her plans a lot and actually likes to do it that way, so pre-planning 9 items early on in the year was not my thing...Plus, if everything goes according to plan, I'll be way too busy for that next year 😉

Pattern: The Pouf pullover by Lion Brand Yarn
Yarn: Schachenmayr Merino Extrafine 85, color 241
Photos taken at home in Asker, Norway with world's most gorgeous model: My cat Otto 😘

Cozy autumn sweater

This is a project I made from a Cotton Candy fabric. I got some new knit fabrics in with this retro floral pattern and I really wanted to showcase them, so I decided to make a garment I need and will use: an autumn sweater.

My favorite jersey dress so far

Remember me saying I'll show you two not season suitable makes? This is the second one 😁.

If you've been following me for a while and seen my makes, you'll know I'm more of a woven fabric than knit fabric person, I prefer the element of "dress up" that woven fabrics give in comparison with the casualness and t-shirt factor of most knits.

But I've been eyeing this particular jersey for a long time, loved it at first sight but thought it was expensive...then a year or so later, it goes on sale! yaaay! I looked at it, decided summer dress and bought me some.

"Burda 6858 + flowers = love" dress

I noticed this pattern first when I was making a dress for my friend and suggested patterns. That was back in 2016, the same year I found it on sale and bought it. Looked at it numerous times since, but none of the fabrics I had seemed to match it and I always had some other project that I wanted to make more.

Red skinny jeans

For Norwegian click here

I made these quite a while ago, but life happened and it's only now that I get the chance to write about it. Originally I was thinking of a 2018 Make Nine list for my shop Cotton Candy, but then found out that it's not practical, I want to make things spur of the moment as new fabrics come in for example...So after sewing 3 items from that list (these jeans, the simple top and a T-shirt dress coming out next spring as it's not weather appropriate in Norway right now) I decided to drop the list.

A red scarf for a red autumn

Well, OK...the autumn is not just red, it's also orange, yellow, green 😍 and potentially grey 😕. But the scarf still fits great with the season. And! with my new faux suede jacket, which was really the main reason I chose the color red. It complements the color stone perfectly.

"I've been thinking about you" jacket

And the reason it got this name is because this pattern was love at first sight. Since it was released in May 2016. I fell for the lightness and simplicity of it combined with the rough-ish look the suede gives.

What do you do with 6 small pieces of fabric or Minerva Crafts 2m lucky dip bundles

This time I got a very interesting product to test for Minerva: The 2m lucky dip fabric bundle. Why is that so interesting? Because:

• You don't know what types of fabric are in a bundle.
• You don't know how big or small the pieces are.

The dress with the nicest neckline

For Norwegian click here

I know I've been saying this a lot about my makes lately, but I love this dress!

It's one of those patterns that were love at first sight since it was released in April 2017, but other projects came in the way, summer ended, and generally life happened. Then this April as I was getting new fabrics for my store I fell in love with one of the new designs, fast forward a few months, the new fabrics arrive in my warehouse, I start taking photos for the website and fall even more in love with the olive green colorway 😍.

My favorite summer top

Click here for Norwegian

A bit after I opened Cotton Candy, I decided to make a 2018 Make Nine list for Cotton Candy as well. There were a few reasons for that:

1. I wanted to showcase some of the nice fabrics I have (obviously).
2. I wanted to inspire sewists in Norway (and maybe outside of Norway too) to make their own pretty clothes and not limit themselves to a difficulty level thinking some project or other is hard.
3. I wanted to make video sew-alongs that show the process of creating a few garments step by step, again to show that anybody can do it.

The crochet top of dreams

I've been wanting to make this top for ages, it's been in my favorites on verena.ru for a very long time. But I didn't want to do it in just any yarn, I wanted some luxury yarn...something I would simply love.

Tunisia blouse

I live in Norway, my youngest sister lives in Egypt. We've been joking for a while about meeting in Tunisia, then one day we realized we don't need visas to go there! So I grabbed my husband, she grabbed our mother and we did it! We met in Tunisia 😄 (you can read my impressions of that trip here, here, here, here and here 😊)

As you might have read before I started a tradition a few years ago to buy a piece of fabric from each new country I visit (if the opportunity arises of course), and the old market of Tunis did offer such an opportunity.

What I bought was a hand woven cotton/polyester mix that is normally used to make traditional Tunisian garments, this was meant for a short vest. I liked the color combination of it: the classic blue, red and white and I liked that it had tassels on the short sides. It didn't take long before I knew exactly what I wanted to make with it.

I wanted a blouse that is loose, with some sort of bell sleeves, a square neckline and a straight hem so I can use the tassels at the hem. This Burda Style pattern was close enough.

But a few modifications had to happen:

   - I made the side seams and hem straight instead of curved so as not to disturb the stripe directions. Read How-to here.

   - I ditched the gathered peplum and instead lengthened the front and back pieces with the same amount. This is simply done by subtracting the seam allowances from the peplum height and adding that at the bottom of front and back, since we don't need any for hemming either given we're using the fabric edge.

   - My fabric wasn't wide enough to leave the sleeve length as is so I shortened it a few cm's to fit into the fabric.

   - And finally replaced the gathered bells at the sleeves with pleated ones. Read How-to here. 

The sewing was pretty easy but the fabric did offer a couple of challenges...being hand woven it wasn't "geometrically correct", it wasn't symmetrical around the center, so I couldn't stripe-match, but it's not disastrously visible so I'm not too sad about that. And I found a little hole that I had to darn.

The result is 😍😍😍. I love it! It's almost that I wish the weather was a bit cooler so I can wear it! Not that I'm complaining about the weather, it's been Norway's best summer ever!

This is also my first July entry for #burdachallenge2018 and my 5th of 9 of Make Nine 2018 😊

Pattern: Burda Style 03/2014 #119
Fabric: Handwoven cotton/polyester mix from the markets of Tunis.
Photos taken at home in Asker, Norway.

A bit of baby sewing

A few months ago, a little girl was born. This little beautiful girl happens to be my niece, and although I was already part of another gift for her christening, I couldn't resist sewing something as well.

World's Easiest Top

I've been wanting to write about this top for a while but 40+ C weather in Cairo and a broken aircon were not helping 😄, but here I am doing it. Coincidentally, this top is perfect for such temperatures, it's easy and fast to make, as well as light and breezy to wear.

I made this for the first time back in 2015 from two silk/polyester scarves as an experiment. It turned out really cool and I even wrote some simple instructions on how to do it on my Burda projects page. It looked like this:

Now a lot of you know that I opened a fabric store some months ago, and as much as I'd like it, fame and customers don't come without work 😄, and I started looking for channels to advertise for myself. I've been a member of a few Norwegian sewing groups on Facebook already, where I showed my makes in general. Then I discovered that one of them also had its own Snapchat account that members can sign up to take over for a day or two. The admins of the group encouraged shop owners to take over and show a normal day at the shop.

I thought why not? I took over one day, talked about Cotton Candy and my reasons behind it, showed my work day, but since it's a sewing group, I thought it'd be nice to also sew something quick and simple in the evening. And what's more perfect than this top? So I clipped me a piece of woven viscose from the shop and went to work.

The feedback was really amazing! People loved it, complimented me on it, saved my snaps for later and those who didn't or who weren't following that day but saw the top on FB and IG later, asked me about the pattern I used. The result of all this is a free sewing pattern that I wrote, and that is available for download in both Norwegian and English from my store here.

I've become a regular on the snapchat account by now, It's such an ego boost! 😂 People are so nice, and it's great to hear that people like what I make, and learn something from what I show.

Pattern: World's Easiest Top by Cotton Candy
Fabric: Woven viscose with abstract print in pink from Cotton Candy
Photos taken in front of Cotton Candy's warehouse in Asker, Norway.

Summer's coolest sweatshirt

As part of the Minerva product testing team, I managed to get my hands on some really interesting fabric. It didn't look super exciting on the site, but when it arrived? Ooh yeah! 😎 It was a spur of the moment pick, so the initial choice of the pattern was too.

"Love me some flounces" blouse a.k.a My first sew-along

Klikk her for norske versjonen

This is exciting and scary at the same time! I've never made videos before, I feel so weird seeing my self/hearing my own voice on the screen.Yikes! The video is not perfect and I'll end up subtitling the Norwegian version to do the English (because instead of repeating the same scene in 2 languages, I thought I'll record voice-over after...doh!) but I learned a lot, so it hopefully only gets better with every new one :)

"Summer in the countryside" dress

Klikk her for Norske versjonen

It has been so summery lately here in Asker, flowers, birds and sun... totally gorgeous! I get almost the same feeling when I look at this dress, spring and flowers and a proper countryside feeling really 😊

Summer jumpsuit with feathers and ribbons

OK, not quite the feathers and ribbons you'd imagine, I must admit. I just used a ribbon as a waist tie and the fabric has this gorgeous feather print on it.

If you've been following my makes for a while, you'd know that I'm a jumpsuit skeptic, out of the 70 or so garments I made for myself, there's been 2 before, one for the beach and one that I ended up splitting into trousers and blouse (because it was too dressy but I loved the fabric and really wanted to get more use out of it). Making this one my third.

Summer in red voile

Klikk her for Norske versjonen

When you love sewing, and you own the fabric store, you feel like making something out of every fabric in the shop 😄 You make loads of plans! This dress is one of the results. A long summer dress in a delightful and airy Egyptian cotton voile.

Fibers and beads - My latest crochet top

This was one of those items I talked about in my UFO post. This turned out into quite the mix of fibers! It all started with this warm colored sand linen and silk yarn. I bought it thinking I'd crochet a simple vest that is decorative more than anything else, the idea of the beads came at the same time and I fell for these tiger eye beads.