Pause for applause.

To recap:

1. Got 10 balls of red cotton for an Xmas present: the balls turned out to have 48,000,000 metres of yarn each, so I made two tanks and an Everlasting Bagstopper.
2. The bagstopper rocks on; the two tanks shrank in such a way that they no longer fitted. BOO. I wore them anyway, persuading myself Nobody Will Notice.
3. Eventually wanted to make a dress: decided the red was perfect and the tanks were dead in the water anyway. UNRAVEL PARTY!
4. Unravelled, washed, loosened, reballed.
5. Cast on! Made meself a dress, with the enchanting name of
   111-3 tailored dress in ”Safran” with lace pattern and crochet borders.
6. This took me 8 weeks and was waaaaay too big. I was swimming in it. Before I had a chance to start convincing myself It Was Fine, Nobody Will Notice, I unravelled. I like knitting, I like knitting, I like knitting.
7. Cast on again, January 1. Cast off January 27. BOOYEAH! That’s some wicked fast knitting right there, dudes.
8. Block, dry: wear to brunch.

Look! Look at this!

Holy cow a porch mushroom!

Cavorting with delight about dress and mushroom.

Is that another mushroom?

“]

[Action shot

Then I started seeing other dresses on Ravelry. Oh, man, there’s some sexy stuff out there. I have a serious knitty-boner for this black dress by Gudrun Johnson. (Here’s the Rav link, if you want to lose hours.) Ravelry seems to be groaning with knitters who have made this dress and are deliriously happy with the results. Ludicrously happy. And rightly so: they’re beautiful.

Then I found Sparkle! (Rav link and sorry about the exclamation mark, it’s part of the pattern name), a resurrected Vogue Knitting pattern. I can’t explain my crush on this dress but I LOVE IT. It resembles nothing I own and I can’t imagine picking it off the rack in a shop without anything but a derisive sneer. But it completely arrests me and I want to make it. I think I would probably make it plain. At first.

So the next thing I know I’ve spent an hour comparing reviews, doing maths to calculate yardage, weighing up prices and filling online shopping baskets only to abandon them in online aisles for the online staff to put back on the online shelves (I’m not proud). I haven’t bought yarn in a really long time: a few years ago I took a bit of a look at my stash and thought “yeah, that’s enough to be getting along with”. So I forgot how seductive and slippery online shopping is. One minute you have a clear goal and a budget: the next, you’re dancing on the shredded pieces of your shopping list and singing your credit card number to the tune of “High on the Hill Lived a Lonely Goat Herd”. I got to the checkout and had a “HOW much?” moment, and walked away.

I sat in the yarn cupboard for a while. It started as a “Yeah, this yarn’s okay for now. Maybe when I’ve worked through it I can buy some more yarn…” visit, a sort of gloomy reminder of all my current yarny commitments. Grump grump grump, no new yarn for me. Then I got into the cupboard and it was like meeting old friends. And remembering all the other things I want to knit. YEAH!

I can knit EVERYthing! AHAHAHAHHA! Coffee Tunic! Sexy Vesty! Kilt Hose! Hats! More skirts! Oooh dear. It’s been a while, but I know the Startitis boogie when I feel my heels shuffling. If I didn’t move quick, I’d come to my senses surrounded by half-finished terrible ideas and that would just be annoying. So I grabbed the nearest yarny chum and needles, and cast on the sexy Coffee Tunic in black. That took the edge off. Digging out a couple of socks that are soooo close to being done it’s silly helped, too.

I don’t need to order dress yarn. I don’t need to knit another dress. I am excited about my socks and the Black Coffee tunic. But butter my butt and call me a biscuit if I’m itching to make more dresses.

A quiet sprint

About 25cm along, almost ready to start the skirt decreases. Zoom! I bet I can do better than eight weeks. I mean, I’m making it a size smaller, and I’ve pretty much memorised the pattern, so it should fly along, right? Logic!

When I tried it on and announced to my admiring public that I would have to unravel and reknit, my fans assured me such steps were unnecessary — that it looked fine, could I shrink it a bit in the wash, and so on. This is a really cool pattern, and I’ve got no qualms about unravelling and reknitting: I’m not bored with it at all, so it’s no burden. At the same time, I’m really surprised at how good it looked (once I pinched the extra foot or so of fabric at the back with a stegosaurus spine of clothespegs) : the fabric had a good drape, the waistline and hem looked good. In short, it’s a super good pattern and I can see it’s worth making in a size that fits. If the badly-fitting practice run had looked wonky or seriously wrong, I wouldn’t have bothered and would now be blogging blithely about the pros and cons of working with shallot casings or something.. But no! Knit on!

The recent acquisition of several gazilion ebooks is helping progress considerably. I can sit and read and knit and demand cups of tea in a demented bray from time to time (with varying degrees of success), and if there’s a finer way of spending a weekend, I’ll bet it involves picking blueberries and frankly I don’t care.

More knitting to do. BBL.

Fig A: complete knitted garment, minding its own business...

spontaneously became this:

Fig B: a ball of yarn and a newly-begun knitted dress!

It’s got to be time-travel. Somehow, my knitted dress, which only required ends-weaving and tender blocking, has de-evolved into a pile of yarn cakes, a rumpled pattern and a new cast-on. Wait, I think I’ve got it: the cognitive collision caused when I realised I’d spent eight weeks knitting a lovely dress in the wrong lovely size was too much for my cranium, so it externalised as a rift in space-time, and the dress slipped through the rift! It went back in time and reverted to its embryonic, just cast-on stage!

This is big, people. Gcdet me the president.

That escalated quickly...

There’s nothing in that picture to give you a sense of size: that WIP goes from past my knees to just under meine kleine booben. Lots of knitting right there. Lemme check Ravelry. 30 October, you say? Well, that seems pretty reasonable. Two months for half a dress, I suppose that’s not that weird. Honestly, though, I feel like it only took off in December. This has been a fantastic social knitting project: round and round and round you go, while chatting away and remembering to purl every sixth stitch every sixth round, and the next thing you know it’s the end of December and you’ve got most of a dress knitted.

Fig 1: Infinity

Once upon a time I told M that if I ever tried to knit a dress, he was to slap me until I came to my senses. I’ve since revised my position. We had a small domestic caucus to review the matter and agreed, in light of new intel, I will continue with the knitted dress. All slapping privileges have been revoked. Like the lovely knitted skirt, I once thought knitting a dress would be an instant ticket to Tacksville (well, not really instant, given knitting’s patient pace). But having had invigorating success with my knitted skirt collection, I boldly cast on!

A closeup! I demand a closeup!

Alert readers may realise that this is the yarn rescued from two well-executed but ultimately doomed tanks. An Essential Tank and a Skinny Empire, both by Wendy Bernard (Knit and Tonic). Awesome patterns, but the cotton shrank post-wash and kinda screwed with the fit of both. It’s got a bit more experience behind it now, so I’m hoping for no surprises come the first wash.

A waist is a terrible thing to mind. Or whatever.

Specs: A-line skirt; panel of lace at hem and under zie booben, sleeveless, v-neck. Looking forward to wearing this sexy thang! However, I’ve reached a quandary. By which I mean mistake. Someone — and this isn’t the time for petty finger-pointing, what’s done is done — didn’t double check the alignment of the end-of-round and halfway markers, so the skirt decreases and bodice increases have wound up a little…wonkified.

Pretty crimson cotton.

So: three options present themselves.

1. Unravel entire dress, realign markers and restart with reassuring symmetry.
2. Drop stitches and unravel just those stitches all the way down to the hem, collect them back up and reassemble using a crochet hook.
3. Carry on as if nothing had happened, correcting symmetry when the time comes for the neckline and arms, ignoring the fact that the bodice increases and skirt decreases are going to be skew-whiff under the right armpit.

If you suggested (1) or (2), you haven’t been paying attention and this might not be the blog for you. Enjoy the pictures, though! If you answered (3), you get full marks, by which I mean one mark. Well done! I will indeed be carrying on if nothing had happened, correcting symmetry when the time comes for the neckline and armholes.

Originally, I had begun persuading myself that the halfway marker was only askew for the bodice, and I was bracing myself and my crochet hook to drop down the eight stitches either side of that marker, to pick them back up with the increases in the right location. But when I realised the problem had begun aaaaages ago, at the hemline, I reconsidered my options. I mean, this dress has moved quick, but not that quick. C’mon.

For a very long time I resisted the urge to explore the possibility of knitting anything other than wintery woolly goods. Jumpers, vests, hats, mitens, etc. All good and proper, wool-appropriate things. Trousers, skirts, shorts and dresses; definitely not knitable. This was reinforced whenever I heard other people rolling their eyes at knitted skirts and dresses (what, you’ve never heard eyes roll? It’s kind of a squishy, scratchy, scraping sound); clearly, skirts and dresses are not to be knitted.

But then along came Intolerable Cruelty and changed everything I know about knitted skirts. Damn sexy. DAMN sexy. Damn SEXY. I’ve made it twice now, and both incarnations are outta-sight-wham-bam-sexy-sam. And talk about comfortable! No, don’t. Just shut up and listen.

Anyway, that kinda broke down some barriers and lead me to question a lot of other presumptions regarding knittery. If knitted skirts can be totally cute, then why not a knitted dress? So I’m using the red cotton recycled from some tank tops that had outstayed their welcome, and I’m making a cute v-neck dress that goes by the alluring name of DROPS tailored dress in ”Safran” with lace pattern and crochet borders. The cotton is kind of tired and not as bright as it was when I first knitted with it, but I thought it worth doing a prototype in a yarn I had close to hand rather than shelling out ninety clams on new yarn. (How do I know it would be about ninety clams? Because I’ve got my eye on my new yarny crush, Kollage Yarns Riveting, in charcoal.)

So let’s see how we go: knit a dress, be awesome; or knit a pile of crap, regret ever mentioning it online. Optional step: give up knitting and take up wicker weaving.

Additional possibility: the dress is so awesome that I order the Kollage Yarn to celebrate, and while making my second dress I discover the magic of knitted leggings, shorts and pants…

…I can definitely see the possibility that this will just traumatise me and reawaken the knitting boundary hangups I previously had to break down. But c’mon, a pair of snug, soft, cotton shorts for sleeping and doing yoga in? I can totally imagine doing that. Can’t you? No? Huh. Just me, then.

A Most Satisfying Conclusion.

It’s good to get these done, just in time for spring (I hope I never have to knit my way out of an emergency). It’s good to finish something I had to start and restart so often — I made Dadini try the first on to confirm the fit, having had to reboot this project so many goddamn times, so I am certain they’re ripe and ready. But another unexpected result of finishing up is reclaiming half my knitting tools. Butter my butt and call me a biscuit, these suckers took a lot of infrastructure. There were so many false starts and I shoved all of them into the bag to keep track of what hadn’t worked out, so when I finally finished, I dug them out and began reclaiming all that yarn. I regained:

• one 4mm circ
• one set of 3.25 dpns
• one 3.5mm circ (interchangeable)
• one set of 4mm circs
• stitch markers
• stitch holders
• two carry bags
• five assorted balls of black yarn, including two balls of Merino Supreme

See? Infrastructure. No wonder they were slow to finish, I needed a sherpa whenever I wanted to work on them.

Give it back, varmint!

Pattern: Knucks! Tres cool design, clear and well-written pattern. Full marks!
Mods: none
Yarn: Stuffed if I know. Acrylic, found in stash. Might have come with the house.

Now the mitts have returned all my tools and Green Sprite is basking in her completed-project status, a very curious thing has appeared behind the couch:

Don't worry, I was confused too.

An empty knitting bag. (Well, okay, not literally empty, but empty of projects, which my the whole point.)

Green Sprite is cast off.

Actually, while we’re on the topic, and to titillate you further by delaying the Final Photo, I want to talk about the binding off. I made Wendy Bernard’s Essential Tank (Ravelry link), which is a most excellent pattern with a narrow neck. I found it problematic when I made it in cotton, because the cotton shrank and the neckline became constrictive. (I’m convinced the regular forceful yank of a tiny-necked tank over my head delayed my industrial piercing healing by months.) The pattern asks you, ever so politely, to pick up and knit, and then bind off, a couple of rounds at the neckline to yoink it into place a little. The first time I did so, it would not go over my head. I was unsurprised: I’m inclined to bind off too tightly. So I sighed, wiped away a brave tear and then punched a fire hydrant, unravelled and restarted. This time I tried the Interlock Bindoff from Knitty which is mega easy and super awesome. Looks nice, too: looks a little loose ‘n’ lacey, but good.

In through the front door, sneak around the back - peep through the window and PISS OFF, JACK!

It’s a sewn bind off, which means you have to estimate how much yarn it’s going to take to bind off. These things always say something like “cut a length of yarn three times the distance of your bind off”, and to me that’s about as useful as “cut a length of yarn the distance of your tendons while running”. Frankly, I’ve got no idea how to measure that. Do I stretch the stitches out to measure? Scrunch them? I just measure out a ridiculous amount of yarn, then double it, then cut it and then have a bit of a lie down because I’m getting dizzy from worrying about a bind off. The instructions for the Interlock Bindoff are clear as anything, and it was totally worth it. So double win: sexy new top, new skill unlocked.

Level up.

chillin'

She took a bath this morning and then spent the day basking on the back porch, letting the sweet breezes of spring croon her dry. Or something. To do: weave in ends, take action photos. Can’t wait.

So Green Sprite was originally going to be a very particular thing: something pixie-sexy and awesome, designed from the ground up by me. But why reinvent the wheel? This pattern rocks and Green Sprite is loving her sexy new lines. Thank you, we’re very happy.

A challenger appears...

It took some time to figure out. Several hours, in fact. But I admit a lot of those hours were spent sobering up. Pro tip: tangles are even harder to solve when you’re drunk. Once the morning had cleared and I was riding the high of waking up without an anticipated hangover, I got down to business.

VICTORY IS MINE

And do you know who won that little tussle? Do ya? Yeah, you totally do. ME. I gave a short, mirthless laugh as I conquered the snarl and tucked its rebellious little arse into a satisfying yarn cake.

I am the boss of yarn.

And then I made about twelve more. I’m ready to launch.

This is a well-worn, fairly thick cotton: I’m thinking of either a skirt or a dress, but haven’t decided which. It’s surprisingly robust and I think it would lend itself well to a Sidewinder skirt, but I think I have enough to make a dress…and I gotsta say, I’m itching to try making a dress.

A glimpse!

Things are progressing, with far more potential and substance than any previous manifestation of this vague and elusive vision.