Kingscot Button Update

I asked you not once but twice for help choosing buttons for this cardi, and then I repaid your helpful comments with stony silence. Where are my manners? I do apologise - I can only imagine that the suspense must have been unbearable, so without further ado...

You may notice that I have gone for none of the previously photographed options. That is because of the words of a rather brusque anonymous commentator (who upon a little probing turned out to be my mother), which hit home:

I think you should find ones that match the shade of the wool - it's busy enough already, better to choose something that doesn't attract any attention. The green ones are very nice, but a bit too fussy for this garment, I would say.

 I had been working on this project for such a long time that I had lost sight of its elaborateness. My mother was right (isn't it annoying when that happens?): this is not a cardigan that needs sparkly buttons, contrasting buttons, flowery buttons, buttons dancing around doing jazz hands. This cardigan calls for demure, slightly pearlescent buttons in a shade similar to the yarn, little blue plastic droplets of buttons that could pass more or less unnoticed through the teal sea twists and bobbles. So that's what it got. I hope you approve.

Help me choose buttons!

 Kingscot needs closure(s). But should they be the iridescent glass ones at the top, or the green flower ones at the bottom? I like how the first ones echo the shape of the bobbles, and perhaps their more neutral colour would be more versatile. Then again, I love the contrast of the green... I need your help! Sometimes I think that choosing the buttons is the trickiest part of making a cardigan.

The Treasures of Granny's Button Box

Centre: the button box. Clockwise from top: general buttons; severed doll head; cluster of shiny silver buttons; two buckles.

None of which, unfortunately, were quite right for my Kingscot cardi (which was what was weighing down the scales in the last post).  I think I'll use one of these two options when I get back to my own, Cambridge-based button store, and possibly photograph it without buttons in the meantime.

It was still fascinating to paw through this heavy repository of buttons and bric-a-brac. Do you have anything like it, either with a collection you've built up yourself or inherited?

Covered Buttons

The more I learn about sewing, the more impatient I am to sprinkle my wardrobe with couture-inspired details like bound buttonholes and French seams. The gap between the knowledge I have accrued and the practical skill I still lack in the apparently simple tasks of cutting and pinning fabric and manipulating it through the machine can be a little frustrating. I have been continuing to work on the Sencha blouse, which has been challenging me in all sort of unexpected ways. The next step in the instructions is to staystitch the neckline. I am making version 3, and am quite apprehensive about stitching around that keyhole, and so I put it off to make some covered buttons. I have a whole house of buttons, but these are unquestionably my favourites. 

Body of a King(scot)

I have finally finished the body of Kingscot. I was rather worried that, despite my careful swatching, this was going to be a disastrous fit, but thankfully it seems to have worked out alright. I plan to work the sleeves top down for to make this completely seamless (hooray!). Now my only doubt is which vintage buttons to choose - the chunky pearls, which echo the bobbles quite nicely, or the sparkly glass ones, which proved tricky to photograph. 

Two Things

1. I have just seen Coraline.

2. I will not be collecting any more buttons any time soon.

Button it

Here is one of the things I have been grumpily refusing to work on.

This is the Forecast cardigan by that I treated you to a grainy close-up of a while ago, and as you can see it is oh-so-nearly finished. All I have left to do is to rip out and re-knit the buttonhole band because there is everything in the world wrong with it. This is maybe an hour's work, at the very most, but I keep putting it off in favour of newer, exciting things. So today I toddled off to John Lewis in the hope of re-motivating myself via the medium of buttons. I was looking for something small and rounded to echo the bobbles, and picked out these...

I was helped in my quest by a very nice shop assistant who was evidently very knowledgeable about knitting, but who had never heard of Knitty.com. My oh my. I guess because so much of what I've learned about the way of the needle has come from the internet I forget that there are a whole load of people who only use books and magazines. Now, I do have a lot of those too, but I have found online patterns to be so much more user-friendly. Perhaps this is partly an issue of space - it is more expensive to produce physical print than to publish something on the internet, so printed patterns tend to have space-saving, telegraphic instructions like 'Keeping patt correct, BO 7 sts at beg of next 2 rows. Dec 1 st at each end of next 7 rows, then on foll 2 alt rows, then on 4 foll 4th rows,' where by contrast self-published patterns can contain sanity-saving paragraphs of explanations, warnings or advice.  

I have gone a little bit button-buying-bananas recently.

The following used to be a fudge house. Now it is a button house.

Most of the little glittering treasures nestling in my palm above are from Loop, where I nipped into on a recent jaunt to London. I had been there last summer when I was staying nearby while rehearsing for a play, but I don't think I realised then the full extent of its awesomeness. It stocks a lot of American yarns that I hear about all the time on podcasts but very rarely get to see in person. This vibrant red Cascade 220 wool spoke to me from the shelf....

... it whispered 'honeybees and faggoting'. Which is, of course, a perfectly legitimate term in lace knitting.