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

I love a blank page.

17 Mar 2025

Poetry & Practicalities

But having an ice breaker helps. Every piece I’ve ever knit has begun with a slip knot. Every set of coaching notes has begun with the date. Journal entries with “good morning”. Designs of all sorts with a spark or a brief or a script. I love a blank page. It’s like a field of fresh snow – perfect for running though and leaving footprints scattered around the place. Listening to the crunch and squeak. Feeling snow slide into your boot from exuberant running over snow drifts that are a little deeper than you expected. Snow covered trees blending with a snow colored sky as you leave a mark on the world that will one day melt. I love a blank page. But having an ice breaker helps. So consider this an ice breaker for Poetry & Practicalities. It may just be what was percolating along side everything else. Photo...

puttering, percolating, steeping and brewing

14 Mar 2018

what's in the works

Each Wednesday, I post a snapshot of the projects I’m working on, and where my brain is at. Last week I wrote this Wednesday morning with every intention of posting it. But then never got around to it: “Each Wednesday, I post a snapshot of the projects I’m working on, and where my brain is at.” That’s the beginning explanation of what I posted each Wednesday for about five years (more sporadically at the beginning), and I’ve missed a couple here and there, but it’s been fairly consistent. But, I stopped around the New Year, posted once a couple weeks into the new year, and haven’t posted again for a couple more weeks. At the moment when I read this my immediate reaction is, what am I working on?! I’m always working on ongoing client work. I’ve finished knitting the sweater I started a couple months ago, and it’s just...

getting back into the swing of things

18 Jan 2018

what's in the works

Each Wednesday, I post a snapshot of the projects I’m working on, and where my brain is at. Whew! Hello 2018! Part of me feels like I’ve begun this whole year already behind, but another part of me reasons that, that is, of course, not possible, because a) a beginning implies clean slate, and a clean slate cannot coexist with “being behind.” And b) because the whole concept of “behind” might very well be an illusion, at least in the “we are all stardust” version of reality. The end of 2017 coincided with wrapping up the second edition of the third book in the Shawl Geometry Series, which had a satisfying element of poetic timing about it. It turns out that the that third book took basically a year to update, and updating the whole series took two. After that was Christmas, and then New Years, and then trying to...

Welcome! I'm Holly Chayes.