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

a cut skirt, and finished sweater – keeping it short and sweet

18 May 2016

what's in the works

Each Wednesday, I take stock of the projects I’m working on, and where my brain is at. Keeping this short and sweet this morning. In my new “figure it out as I go along” version of the Anna Dress – I cut the skirt – and then promptly needed to move on to other things. I did manage to snag a bit of time to weave in the ends and block my well-traveled lace weight sweater – a travel story and finished objects post to come soon. The layout for the Shawl Geometry Books Update is happening – rather slower than I would like – but happening all the same. Though ending up sick all weekend probably didn’t help anything. And that’s the cliff notes. No related posts.

making time for making

11 May 2016

what's in the works

Each Wednesday, I take stock of the projects I’m working on, and where my brain is at. My primary focus for this week has been getting the new schematics for the Shawl Geometry Books finished, and diving headlong into laying out all of the patterns. This may seem a little bit backwards – laying everything out before editing. But I find with knitting patterns that the clarity of a pattern is rather intrinsically tied to how the information is laid out. How the graphics, text, headings all interact with each other is just as important to the readability & understand-ability of a knitting pattern as the knitting pattern itself. And laying the pages out in something approximating their final layout, lets me treat the pattern (including the intro, instructions, photo, schematic, and tips) as one unit rather than many. So a lot of my time this past week (and this...

Why am I sick of all the clothing in my wardrobe?!

10 May 2016

Flourishing Wardrobes, Style, thoughts & things

I’m currently dressing out of a suitcase I packed in the middle of December – with the vague idea (but no desire to closely examine the thought) that I’d be living out of it for longer than my originally projected 10 weeks. I ended up with 20 pieces in my suitcase dictated capsule wardrobe. Which is about 10 pieces under the number of clothes I had at the end of my year long, handmade wardrobe challenge. So the question I keep coming back to as I plan my summery wardrobe infusion is: why am I sick of all the clothes in my wardrobe?! Is it the clothes themselves? I ended up with approximately a 50/50 handmade/store bought clothing split in my carry-on suitcase sized capsule wardrobe. So about 50 percent of the clothes in this current wardrobe were made by me, for me, as part of the self-made wardrobe project....

Welcome! I'm Holly Chayes.