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 Versio Sweater – a body, sleeves, and a change of plans

09 Sep 2014

Projects

The weather is (finally) cooling down again here in New York, and it’s starting to feel like fall (again), so I took the opportunity to finish up the sleeves of my Versio sweater. The pattern is Versio by Ankestrick (here on Ravelry.) I’m using a 4 different lace weight yarns: 1 skein of Julie Asselin’s “Merletto” – the blue 1 skein of Sweet Georgia’s “Merino Silk Lace” – the red 1 skein of Fiberspates’ “Scrumptious” – the gold 2 skeins of Cascade’s “Forest Hills” – the black Holding 2 strands of yarn together throughout the entire thing, and knitting it on a US 8 (5.0 mm) needle. I’m also adding the hood modification that Rililie on Ravelry wrote up. The pattern is knit top down, seamlessly, and using the contiguous set in sleeve method. I had never head of this method for creating set in sleeves – but I might...

Which mistakes can you live with?

08 Sep 2014

thoughts & things

We all make mistakes. (Obviously.) And fortunately in knitting, (almost) every mistake is fixable. (Apart from things like lighting your sweater on fire.) But that doesn’t mean all mistakes need to be fixed. I’m not advocating sloppiness, because there’s no need for that. But pure perfection is boring, and usually unattainable. Wafian has a spot where the boarder is garter instead of i-cord – when I got distracted for a row. Eirwen has a couple loose stitches near the beginning – where the magic loop pulled a yarn over too large. Izar has a couple stripes completely out of order – where I forgot what I was doing for a bit. Tumbling Deco was supposed to have a smooth boarder (like Mrs. Peacock) – but I didn’t have the blocking wires. When it comes to mistakes in my knitting my thinking is… : if it’s structural, fix it. (an incorrect...

The Self-Made Wardrobe Week 5

05 Sep 2014

The Self-Made Wardrobe

The Self-Made Wardrobe is a project where I only wear garments I’ve made, for one year. You can read more about the project here. Week five is finished! It was a mostly straight forward week, some sewing and some knitting, when I wasn’t melting. It would seem that August decided to throw us a swelter-y farewell party, which made for some really gross knitting weather. I did get the ball of black yarn I needed to finish my Versio sweater, so that when the weather does get better I can finish it up. And wrote some reminders to myself about what I like wearing and what I don’t. But in much more exciting news, I spent yesterday conducting my first experiment at sewing jeans. I took a rub off of a pair of jeans I have that fit pretty well (not perfect) but well enough, worked up a basic pattern,...

Welcome! I'm Holly Chayes.