FO: Maddy

Does it fit? Does it fit? Does it fit?

IT FITS!

Pattern: IT’S COMING DAMMIT (sigh, I’ll edit in the link when it’s done, which WILL be in the next few days, I swear) IT’S HERE DAMMIT
Size: uh, me-sized? will fit about a 34″-36″ bust
Yarn: Alchemy Silk Purse in Rust Red, 4 skeins (note: these are the older skeins with more yardage)
Needles: US size 4

Apologies in advance for the picspam, I’m damn proud of this thing, and I took a million billion pics of it, and you’re going to humour me and look at them all, dammit. (Or you’re going to close your browser and laugh at me. Sob.)

It’s not perfect. It’s really obvious where the skeins change (alas, they all looked the same colour in the skein, otherwise I would have planned a smoother transition), and I’m not sure how long it’s going to fit as well as it does, given silk’s tendencies to stretch and sag. But damn, did I guess at the right measurements or what? This is probably the closest I’ve ever come to having a knit garment fit exactly right.

The pattern… oh, the pattern. I am the kind of knitter who reads over a pattern, figures out how it works, and promptly ignores the pattern details. I don’t need rows and rows of “k1, p2, k16, yo, slm, yo, k16…” and such, what I need is “knit in pattern to marker, increase just before and after marker”, general stuff, and if I can’t remember how many stitches before the marker to increase, I can look that up.

Unfortunately, that sort of hand-wavy instruction makes for a very confusing pattern, and writing up the pattern is very nonintuitive to me. For example, I kept moving around the point where a round starts/ends, and for a large chunk of the pattern I didn’t even have a round marker there, so I’m going to have to figure out where a normal knitter would want to put the round marker. Otherwise I will have to append “it all makes sense in my head, I swear” to every other line of the pattern, and that’s going from “Half-Assed Patterns” all the way to “This Pattern Is Useless And I Hope The Idiot Who Wrote It Gets Eaten By An Angry Giant Squirrel”.

I’ll make it work. I think.

For anyone who might be thinking of making it (I’m trying to be optimistic and assume that someone, somewhere will like it enough to make one, heh), it’s not a difficult pattern. I suspect it looks harder than it is. The hardest bit is increasing in the lace pattern for the yoke, and it’s not hard so much as head-hurty. I’m going to try to include very clear directions for using extra stitch markers in that section to prevent total loss of sanity. The lace bits at the bottom are rectangular, so they’re super easy, and all the increases at the bottom are done in the stockinette section.

Very strange not to be writing about mods, given that there are none, because the pattern is MINE ALL MINE. Though I do want to say that looking at the pattern for Picovoli was very helpful; it has sort of the same shape I was going for, and similar gauge, so it was a useful “are my stitch counts in the right ballpark?” reassurance.

Designing this was a neat experience (occasional fits of “HELP ME I AM GOING MAD!!!” aside), but I’m kind of relieved it’s all finished.

I’ll be even more relieved if when I successfully write up a legible pattern for it.

15 Aug 2007  ·   Tags: Finished Objects, Maddy