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

sticking with a project that has high burnout potential – The Self-Made Wardrobe Week 30!

27 Feb 2015

The Self-Made Wardrobe

The Self-Made Wardrobe is a project where I only wear garments I’ve made. It’s sort of a year long experiment in getting dressed without clothing labels. DAY 204 – Friday, February 20th purple sweater// black tank top // black maxi grey cowl // black tights // brown boots // various rings There’s something poetic about a project that last a year. One year. No more, no less. Birthday to birthday. A year, being both a really long time, and absolutely no time at all. It turns out the number of things you can do in a year, or that can happen in a year, is pretty astounding. To have a project that lasts a year, is to have a project that is going to run alongside (or against) all of the “stuff” that happens in that year. So the rules/guidelines/conditions for the project have to deal with that in some...

I’m stuck on second sleeve island.

25 Feb 2015

what's in the works

Each Wednesday, I post little snippets about the projects I’m working on. Déjà vu? Me too. This sweater sleeve looks eerily similar to how it looked last week. It is slightly longer – I manage to squeeze in a couple hours of selfish knitting this week, but that’s about it. Almost all of my crafting time has been spent working on a project I can’t talk about yet (sad panda). So I’ve spent the week working away on it, and starting longingly at the piles of things I want to make. In the meantime, I’ve been loving the hell out of my handspun-handknit sweater, and it’s rekindled my spinning interest. No related posts.

A handspun, handknit sweater

24 Feb 2015

FOs, The Self-Made Wardrobe Garments

I love spinning, and took up spinning pretty quickly after I started knitting. This is the first time I’ve ever spun enough yarn for a sweater though. And while, I probably won’t turn into a knitter who knits exclusively with handspun yarn, going from fiber -> yarn -> sweater was pretty damn amazing. This is a sweater knit entirely out of handspun yarn. Yesterday I wrote about the process of spinning the yarn, now details about the sweater itself. MATERIALS: Yarn – 250 yards (228.5 m) – 2 oz (56.5 g) – handspun heavy lace weight grey BFL – 250 yards (228.5 m) – 3 oz (85 g) – handspun heavy lace weight alpaca – 500 yards (457 m) – 9 oz (255 g) – handspun worsted weight alpaca All the yarn are super basic two ply yarns – the lace weights are much more even than the worsted weight,...

Welcome! I'm Holly Chayes.