Holly Chayes

Welcome! I'm Holly Chayes.

This online space has been around in one form or another since 2010, it focuses on making, creativity and living a curious life, plus a lot of clothing.

Some of the projects I've worked on in the past 10+ years include...

Talking About Clothes with Holly Chayes

An interview podcast that's all about clothing (and also, not *really* about clothing at all). Find all the details and listen to conversations about comfort, style, change and shopping here. Or search for Talking About Clothes with Holly Chayes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Who Wears Who?

The Self-Made Wardrobe Project

Predecessor to Who Wears Who, a year-long challenge in 2014/2015 where I only wore clothes I made. That year would have been a lot easier if the clothes had magically made themselves. Learn more about The Self-Made Wardrobe Project and explore the archives here.

The Shawl Geometry Book Series

Enough shawl shapes to keep you knitting for a lifetime. A multi-year exploration of math, shape and space in knitting, where I documented traditional shawl shaping, and iterated on those traditions to create new recipes of shawl shaping. Ultimately this lead to 75+ shapes, and 400+ pages of common and uncommon shawl shaping instructions. This project was inspired by a dozen individual shawl designs, each encapsulating a love of geometric lace design. You can find The Shawl Geometry Series here.

Thank you for being here with me. –Holly

eating up yarn. nom, nom, nom

22 Jan 2014

what's in the works, WIP Wednesdays

I’m always working on some project or another, and most weeks I talk about what I’m working on Wednesdays as part of Tami’s WIP Wednesday project. You can see past WIP Wednesdays … right this way. Half the works-in-progress from last week are sitting right where I left them, but the other half made progress in leaps and bounds. I bound off the blue shawl shortly after taking the photos for last week’s post. Wheeeee! The golden shawl is at the magical point where, it no longer needs to be magic looped, but hasn’t turned into a blob yet. And the purple shawl is quickly eating up yarn (which I can’t say or think, without going nom, nom, nom) , while I contemplate edgings. This was part of Tami’s WIP Wednesday project. If you’d like more WIP Wednesday posts, from other bloggers, visit Tami’s blog. No related posts.

How many stitches are in a shawl anyway?

20 Jan 2014

FOs

I thought it’d be interesting to calculating the number of stitches in the last shawl FO I posted about (dang it’s been awhile since I posted a shawly FO.) Lapidarius was a basic rectangular shawl with: 67 stitches per row 48 rows per repeat 12 repeats in the shawl 1 set up row and 6 border rows on either end. So: (6 border rows) + (6 border rows) + (1 set up row) = 13 border rows (48 rows per repeat) x (12 repeats in the shawl) = 576 patterned rows (576 rows in the patterned section) + (13 border rows) = 589 rows total (589 rows total) x (67 stitches per row) = 39,463 stitches total (damn!) I was expecting a lot of stitches, but certainly not that many! I was expecting maybe a couple thousand, but not almost 40,000 stitches for a (relatively) small shawl! Now if you’ll...

balanced unbalance

15 Jan 2014

what's in the works, WIP Wednesdays

I’m always working on some project or another, and most weeks I talk about what I’m working on Wednesdays as part of Tami’s WIP Wednesday project. You can see past WIP Wednesdays … right this way. I often have lots of projects on the needles, but four shawls, a coat, and a series of swatches is a little much, even for me. It presents a bit of a dilemma. Do you work a little bit on all of them, but not really see a huge amount of progress? Do you focus on one of them, and neglect the others? Do you come up with a “knitting schedule”? I’ve been trying to give a little bit of attention to each project, but some have ended up neglected. The oldest work in progress on the needles still hasn’t come out of it’s project bag, and the swatches haven’t been touched. ...

Welcome! I'm Holly Chayes.