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

Mittens For Spring

02 Apr 2012

FOs

Honestly I thought I’d have more time to devote to, well, everything once the performance was over. Knitting, blogging, sleeping, the important things. But now I’m laughing at myself for even thinking that thought, and with us heading towards the end of the semester alarmingly quickly, I can’t see The Busy stopping anytime soon. The written portion of the thesis is demanding time and attention at the moment, and funnily enough, it doesn’t get any closer to being finished if I don’t work on it (crazy thought), so it’s been getting lots of love, and a bit of swearing. Seeing as I haven’t perfected knitting and typing at the same time, that means I haven’t been doing much knitting. But I did manage to weave in a couple ends, which mean… I have mittens! Just in time for spring. Oh well. Pattern: my own. It’s just a basic mitten pattern...

Post Thesis Haze

16 Mar 2012

FOs, Playing Catch Up

Things have been sort of (read: completely) crazy around here. My thesis performance went up Wednesday night, so that’s now finished. And the next couple days I’ll be focused on relaxing and picking up all the balls I dropped over the last few weeks. Including, but not limited to, laundry, cleaning, knitting, blogging, and reading for other classes, before I start focusing on the written portion of my thesis. I think, I’m going to try and gather a bunch of the photos of the performance and accompanying exhibit into a post, probably early next week. Even though there’s no knitting, there are pretty dresses, and who doesn’t like some pretty every now and then. Anyway, even with the thesis monopolizing my life I have gotten some knitting done mostly in bits and pieces, a podcast here, 15 minutes there. (Much like this post in fact, a sentence here, a paragraph...

Three and a Half Mittens

01 Mar 2012

General Stuffs

Four days ago, I didn’t have three and a half mittens. I had no mittens. (Ignoring the other two sets waiting for their ends to be woven in. Shhhhhhhh.) But I did have cold, raw, wind chapped hands, some yarn, and a lot of stress. So I cast on some hand protecting, yarn using, stress conquering mittens. And a couple hours later I had a mitten. So I cast on the second. And then the third. And then the fourth. And now I have mittens. They’re complete potato chip knitting. No related posts.

Welcome! I'm Holly Chayes.