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

Photos: Ponycorns and Rainbow Fragments

09 Jul 2012

FOs, Photo shoots

Ponycorns and Rainbow Fragments. I really love the way that this came out, especially how the patterning diagonal lines and the crazy amounts of color don’t compete, but rather work with each other. Sometimes the patterning is more dominant, and sometimes the colors take over, I think that the other is still always visible and present within the shawl. Most of the time I’m extremely cautious when it comes to crazy color and lace, but I think in this case it came out great. Ravelry Project Page No related posts.

Knit, knit, spin, spin

05 Jul 2012

General Stuffs

There hasn’t been a huge amount of knitting going on. Partly because it has been so hot, and partly because I’ve mostly been spinning (at leas that’s what it feels like). The Not Quite Argyle Sweater, the shawl with 8,000 beads, Ghosts & Mirrors, and my purple Zodiac le Plume have all gotten a row or two added to each of them, but certainly not enough to be very noteworthy. The two projects I have been working on however, have seen a tremendous amount of progress since the last time you saw them. The first, which was only just started the last time I photographed it, and now fits comfortably around the 40″ circular that I have it on. The lace patterning isn’t super clear in this photo, but it’s interspersed with sections stockinette stripes. Sort of potato chip knitting, because I love getting from stripe to stripe to stripe,...

Photos: Spider Silk

04 Jul 2012

FOs, Photo shoots

Spider Silk. I’ll probably switch out some of the photos in the pattern for some of these because I think these show the details of the shawl much better. The fabric is light and airy because it’s knit in a lace weight, but at the same time it’s cushy and soft due to the garter stitch. It’s very simple to knit, since I designed and knit it at a time when everything was kind of crazy, and I just needed something easy to work on. Something that I could pick up and put down without thinking about. So as a more experienced knitter I found it to be great comfort knitting, but for a newer lace knitter it would also be a great introduction to knitting with lace weight yarn. Ravelry Project Page No related posts.

Welcome! I'm Holly Chayes.