A lace marathon, or that's how it felt to me.
I think the best thing I can do is get straight down to pictures, don't you?
So that's the lace dress with a fabric dress underneath.
I'll be telling you about the fabric dress I'm wearing underneath the knitted dress, next week, it's something I'm really pleased with, and want to share with you.
The next day, I wore my lace dress over jeans and a long sleeve t-shirt, for a slightly different look.
I think I prefer the dress underneath, I love the colour contrast.
I'm not sure whether I enjoyed knitting this dress, the experience is a bit hazy. Because I had to concentrate when knitting it, I had to knit in fits and starts, a few rows here, a few rows there, when I had a quiet moment, and it seemed endless. I loved watching the lace pattern develop, that was wonderful. And I like the colour of the yarn, which I'd describe as burnt orange, but everyone else sees as red.
I would knit a lace garment again, despite the frustration and pain, purely because it seems like magic knitting. With a few yarn overs and knitting togethers and so-on, you get lace! MAGIC.
This pattern is called the "Alpaka Tunic", and it's by Deborah Newton. It's available to buy on-line from Interweave, as a single pattern, here.
There are some lovely photos of a beautiful lady wearing a grey version of the dress here.
I used 4 mm nedles to knit this, because the general consensus when looking at people's Alpaka Tunics on Ravelry, was that it comes out quite big if the 5.5 mm needles are used.
The yarn I used was "Scappa" DK, which is 100% wool, spun and hand dyed in Scotland. After washing, this yarn softened up.
My major modification to this dress was to not knit the sleeves, I felt it looked nicer with out them.
I started this dress 28th October 2011, as evidenced in this blog post. It was finished and blocked on 14th April 2012, so length of time to knit it? About five and a half months.
Thank you very much to Hugo for patiently taking the photos of me, he did a great job.
I'm going to go and put this on my ravelry page, here. On Ravelry I'm vanessahc, you can see all my other knitting projects here.
Righty-ho, I'd better be going, things to do, you know how it is.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Vanessa xxx