Mother of pearl buttons

Bought those beauties in a little haberdashery shop in Palma. They are carved from mother of pearl shell. Are'nt they lovely?

Coraline

I found the most beautiful buttons for my Coraline . They are vintage deep ruby glass buttons encased in brass. I've already blocked the cardigan and today made the buttons loops with embroidery floss matching the light grey rowan baby alpaca. The red and grey work great together and I like the smocking detail on the yoke.

Vintage buttons

Last evening I was given a precious present. Have a look at this..

Those beauties came from a well established button shop in Southsea , this is all I'm saying. Dont want the vintage supply to dwindle out, haha. They are all individual and bottom row plays on the moon , sun and stars theme . All metal and absolutely charming ! Thank you ever so much , Caroline, you are as obssesed as me!

White as Sugar

I'm always looking up for unic wearable designs and my latest find is the danish designer Marianne Isager. I was aware of her but when I stumbled upon her book Japanese Inspired Knits I thought that is one to look out for. She has a nice way with colors and what looks like simple forward approach towards knitting but a closer look shows a thoughtful brilliant construction about her garments. I have started knitting a piece from Classic knits.

Its called 'Sugar'. A clean lined cardigan worked in garter stitch, punctuated with narrow two stitch cables.

Now Marianne knitted her cardi with her own yarns which are not readily available in the UK. I have swatched a few times to achieve a slightly tighter gauge and came up with a combination of rowan kid silk haze in white teamed with a cone of Lacy Shetland 'supreme' which was bought last year in Ally Pally.

Knitting is very slow with this one as it is garter and the back and two fronts are being knitted in one go. I'm putting myself a target of achieving at least one button hole per day. so far so good.

Here is a close up. The book shows 2 cardigans , one with dark buttons and one with creamy color. I chose to have the dark ones from rowan as contrast. What do you think? We love...!