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

The Self-Made Wardrobe Week 8 – sweater weather is here

26 Sep 2014

The Self-Made Wardrobe

I still don’t have jeans. I still desperately want jeans. But unfortunately it’s starting to get a bit chilly, and what I really need more than jeans, are sweaters. Lots of cushy, cozy, warm sweaters. So my quest for jeans is being put aside for the moment in favor of sweater knitting. Lots and lots of sweater knitting. I’m this close to finishing my Versio sweater. Yay! I’m almost done with a sweater I started three years ago. Double yay! I started knitting a black lace weight sweater that’s a total nightmare to knit, but I know that I’ll love wearing. Half a yay? Plus there’s the pile of half finished sweaters I’ve started through the years… Also! I got my tripod – so I’m going to play around with taking garment photos – (yay! & eep! all at the same time). If you want to know the moment...

The Versio Sweater – hood, finishing, and making twisted cord

25 Sep 2014

Projects

The pattern for Versio has a wide deep square collar, but instead of working the collar I followed Rililie’s notes on Ravelry about how to create a hood. I was pleased enough with the way it came out to use it as a starting point for the hood I worked on my (Hopefully) Perfect Transitional Weather Sweater. After the knitting was all done and the (mountain of) ends were woven in, I went back and duplicate stitched around the bottom of the V neck to tighten the loose stitches, and fix some wobbly ones. It’s a little bulky in real life, but not too bad, and I don’t think it’ll be noticeable while I’m wearing it. The bottom hem, and the hems at the wrists, are worked flat and turned under to create a tube that you’re supposed to thread cording through. Since I used so many colors on my...

sweaters, shawls, and jeans

24 Sep 2014

what's in the works

Each Wednesday I post little snippets about the projects I’m working on. You can see all of the Wednesday posts here. So I didn’t manage to completely finish two sweaters this week, which was my very relaxed “goal” from last week, but I did make a lot of progress. If you follow my on instagram, you saw the massive pile of ends that I had to weave in on my Versio sweater, as well as my experiments with different colors of cording for the hems. I ended up going with yellow and blue cording, now the sweater just needs to be washed, blocked, photographed, and worn. Yay! My (hopefully perfect) transitional sweater has sleeves (!) and I have the zipper. So now it’s just another pile of ends to weave in, before I can wash it, block it, insert the zipper and wear it!!! I also started super basic black...

Welcome! I'm Holly Chayes.