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

FO: Secret Love

08 Nov 2013

FOs

I’m always working on some project or another, which means I often have FOs and new designs to share. You can see all my FOs … here … and all my designs … here. Fiber: a 4.6oz loop bullseye bump- merino, corriedale, angelina Fiber Source: loop Yardage: 350 yards Yarn Weight: fingering-ish If you’d like more FO Friday posts, from other bloggers, visit Tami’s blog. No related posts.

lace cables and garter stitch

06 Nov 2013

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’ve been working on a couple projects the past couple weeks. None of which have been the posy and celedon shawl. But all of which have seen lots and lots of progress. I haven’t had a lot of time to knit, but when I was able to carve out a chunk of time, I focused primarily on a shawl you haven’t seen yet. It’s a circular shawl with a lace cable pattern, knit out of the Verdant Gryphon’s Eidos in “fenris” and “blinding polyphemus.” Once it’s blocked you’ll be able to see the patterning much, much better. That’s the magic of blocking. And when I wasn’t working on that, I was working on...

a good smack over the head

05 Nov 2013

thoughts & things

How do you choose colors for your knitting projects? Choosing colors and color combinations that look good and that appeal to you is tricky. Developing your sense of color takes time and effort. But then learning to trust your color sense usually takes a smack over the head or two. For me, Anwar was a huge lesson in following my gut when it comes to choosing colors. The initial idea for the shawl came about when Sharon contacted me about designing a shawl for a Spin & Knit-a-Long (SKAL) in the Spin a Shawl Ravelry group. The idea was to create a circular shawl similar to Eirwen for a single ply lace weight yarn that the group members could spin yarn for and then knit together as a group. We came up with the idea of doing a color sequence that would allow the spinners to spin color A, then...

Welcome! I'm Holly Chayes.