Marital Arts

It’s a beautiful day! Of course, it would be even more beautiful if I could spend it with my beloved husband to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. Instead, he just arrived in his next concert destination in Alsace, while I’m here in our summer house on the paradise island with the kids. We will see each other again in Tallinn in 10 days.

Photo: Annika Metsla

Our wedding day exactly one year ago was simply magical! We have the most beautiful memories of the entire event. Everything went exactly the way we had planned, and we had tan absolutely wonderful team of professionals working with us. I know I have promised to cover the different aspects of our wedding preparations in here too, and so far I have hardly even touched the subject, but I will definitely do it in the future, introducing all these great artists and professionals we were happy to meet and hire during our wedding planning, from the designer of the rings to the caterers. I’m excited to re-live all these cherished memories when blogging about them!

Photo: Annika Metsla

I’m so happy and blessed to have this man in my life He has brought along so many wonderful things. Thanks to him, I’m living the life of my dreams.

The last picture was taken in early July by a photographer friend Kaupo Kikkas, when we revisited the wedding venue, Õisu (Eusekyll) Manor in South Estonia to get some new portrait photos of Kristjan. We used this opportunity to have Kaupo take a few of shots of our entire gang as well, which has increased by one member since the wedding. I'm looking at this black and white image, and I'm seeing colours - as bright and vibrant as our life together.

Photo: Kaupo Kikkas

About...

It literally took me AGES to get to it, but when I finally did, it turned out not to be such an insurmountable task after all. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you the freshly crafted "About" text of my Etsy store. Of course, I would be very grateful for  any tips about further pieces information I should add etc., so please let me know if you have ideas on how to improve it. :)

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Welcome to KERA Softwear! My name is Epp and I like to make beautiful, functional things.

Crafting has been a dear hobby for me for years. I have been knitting and crocheting since I was a child. However, it started to take a more serious nature for me a few years ago, when I decided to open an Etsy store and make it a playful business beside my day job as a translator. I immensely enjoy designing functional and feminine fashion accessories to balance the time I spend behind the blinking computer screen, converting things from one language into another.

For my passion for handicrafts I have to thank my late grandmother Elisabeth who first introduced me the endless possibilities of the versatile art of crochet when I was a child. She herself was a skilled crocheter, creating beautiful and meticulously realized garments and fashion accessories. Using the very limited selection of materials available at the time behind the Iron Curtain, she was able to turn simple cotton threads and dull-looking lambswool yarns into intricate cardigans and clutch bags etc. I have started to see it as my mission to bring her legacy to the next level, taking advantage of my access to the endless variety of inspiring high quality materials and using the cream of them to create exquisite luxury items, such as clutch bags and purses, hand-knitted lace shawls, scarves and fingerless gloves. As a tribute to my beautiful grandmother and the remembrance of the past, I am still using her size 3 crochet hook for many of my projects, with Czechoslovakia written on its side. This “lucky needle” travels with me everywhere I go.

I mostly find my inspiration from nature, its infinite variety of colours, patterns, shapes and textures. No matter how crazy and out-of-this-world designs you may create, you can rest assured the shapes and shades already exist somewhere in the nature. My surrounding environment is a constant source of inspiration to me. However, my greatest joy comes from my little “crew*: my husband Kristjan and our two adorable children, son Uku (3) and daughter Ada (9 months). Although it often feels that they all have mastered their own special ways to keep my mind off my crafting business, it is them who I see as my greatest source of inspiration and motivation. There is so much blessing and happiness in my life, and I truly hope that my products also exude some of this positive energy and the joy I have felt when creating them, which carries on to all the beautiful people wearing them all over the world.

For more information about my life, thoughts and working process, please also visit the blog section of my website at www.kerasoftwear.com. 

Thank you so much for stopping by and reading this!

Sapphire Blue

Early summer I received another exciting custom request from one of my ‘gold clients’, a lovely lady from the States who has ordered and bought many items from my Etsy store over the past few years. It’s always so much fun brainstorming with her to find the best design solutions and materials for her custom requests. Many of her wishes have inspired me to test new things and think outside the box.

This time, she requested a set of hand-knitted lace shawl, lacy fingerless gloves, a shell clutch and a silk satin sash belt with flower embellishments and extra long ties. It was so much fun to work on the order, although none of the designs were new. It was the colour that intrigued me the most this time. At first, she hesitated, whether to go for lime green or royal or sapphire blue, so I suggested what most appealed to me at the time: sapphire. Mostly because I had been looking at these skeins of super soft feather-like kid silk mohair for some time in my local yarn store, but hadn’t yet found a right project to inspire me. It wasn’t too difficult to colour-match the rest of the materials: silk satin for the sash belt, materials for the clutch bag, beads for the fingerless gloves and Swarovski Elements crystal buttons). Some of these I already had in my stash anyway.

The central and most time-consuming item in the set was of course the lace shawl. This pattern, Branching Out by Susan Pierce Lawrence published in Knitty online magazine a few years ago has been my favourite for large ethereal lace shawls. Intricate and detailed, but very easy to remember and knit, with no hocus pocus, such as nupps. I have found the perfect way to combine three pattern panes into a wide lace shawl. The crochet lace edging is my own original design. I had some trouble finding the right density along the narrow sides of the shawl, but I got it right on the second go. 

Yarn: King Kid Silk by Classic Yarn

Needles: Size 5 circular bamboos; crochet hook size 3

I had my biggest a-ha! moment with the silk sash though. I had had similar sash belts with 3D textile flower embellishments in my selection before, but I had always limited the length with the width of the fabric pane (usually 1.5 m or so), which is not very long for a tie belt. As the client specifically requested a belt with extra long ties, I was a bit puzzled as to how to solve it, as I already had the textile in the perfect shade of blue, but - as always - only 1.5 meters long. What I really didn’t want was the look of the belt disrupted by a visible seam somewhere in the middle. So I came up with this: the one inevitable seam is discreetly hidden behind one of the flower embellishments. The result: a belt 2.56 meters long. It’s the perfect length for a tie belt, and I’ll be sure to use this solution from now on!

Wishing you guys a wonderful rest of the summer with warmest greetings from the paradise island!