A Bigger Swatch

So look at the new swatch. Isn't it pretty? And large!?!?!










Look how tiny it was at the beginning of yesterday! It grew! A lot! Who thought I'd get so excited about an unblocked lace swatch?!?!

Since the verdict was definitely towards sizing up the needles, I threw caution to the minds and whipped out a pair of 8's. The point of this swatch was to see the lace on the bigger needles and to try decreasing the pattern.

Last night was a mini-knit night with Jenny, Tegan and wine in my living room. I had a very basic idea of how I was going to do the decreasing - just knit 2 together on the right and slip slip knit on the left for every right side row. This sort of worked. For one thing, it was more complicated than I'd thought it would be and I probably should have sat with the chart and planned it out rather than winging it. For another, winging it while chatting with the girls, watching a movie (Twilight - eh) and working my way through a bottle of wine was perhaps not the most efficient or wise way to go about it. Whatever, it was fun and that is part of the idea behind this whole thing - that I might enjoy myself and maybe even learn something! Plus, what is the likelihood of me knitting the whole thing without a single glass of wine (or vodka)? Very small.

But still - it more or less worked! The repeats got smaller (duh) and since the pattern is a square, 16 stitches x 16 rows, knitting through the chart one time fully decreases out one repeat of the pattern. Basically I cast on five repeats, worked through the chart once, then marked off the repeats on each end. I decreased at the beginning of the repeat to the left of the first marker and at the end of the decrease to the right of the second marker. So if the repeats were numbered 1,2,3,4,5 I was decreasing on 2 & 4. By the time I worked through the chart once I had repeats 1,3 & 5 remaining. Tonight I'm going to work through again and eliminate repeat 3, currently neatly bracketed by my stitch markers.

This is how I plan to create a train. Or what passes for a train and what may just be some fullness in the back. Nutella Nutterson said in the comments for my first post that the dress seems very Regency. And although I wasn't thinking Regency when I had the idea, it is a Regency kind of look. In fact when I was trolling the Internet looking for patterns for the fabric portion of the dress, I found Sensibility Patterns. Some very nice patterns, from which I lifted the idea of having back fullness. But I still kind of want a train. I'm trying to think that if I cast on and then start decreasing, will that automatically make a train since the part between the markers will be longer? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this.

So to go back to last night, poor Justin came home to fine three women, two open bottles of wine and Twilight playing on his 50" TV. He took one look at Robert Pattinson's red lips and pale face and said "Oh god, I know what movie this is." At which point we all giggled hysterically, knowing that due to some Amazon website confusion, Amazon thought that HE was the one who had ordered a 24 hour download of Twilight. You know that link at the top of Amazon where it says "Hi Justin! If you're not Justin, click here..." I didn't click there. Someone's going to be getting some interesting Amazon recommendations off of this one. Trying to distract Justin from the vampires I said,
Me: Oh hon, we ordered pizza.
Justin:I know.
Me: How? (General surprise from all the ladies)
Justin: I got an email from Domino's about my order. (Pause) It came right after the email from Amazon congratulating me on my order for the online version of Twilight.

I really should watch the defaults on our browser.

When the girls left he turned to me and said "that was a lot of estrogen"

Of course then we watched The Room on Cartoon Network. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the dress, but it was so bizarre that I felt I must mention it. It's the worst movie I've ever seen. And I've seen Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Oh and to go back to the dress, someone asked if I was open to other lace patterns. I am.

Finally, I enlisted a lovely assistant to help me showcase the swatch. Enjoy!