Curses! Frogged Again!

So you remember that nice eyelet blouse I've been working on? Well, despite the removal of the lace panel, things still went wrong. I planned four inches of ease. Somehow, I wound up six inches shorter than I remember measuring, and three inches wider.

Once something like that happens, there's nothing you can do, except reclaim the yarn. There's cotton drying in hanks in my shower.

Sigh. Back to the drawing board. Maybe I'll try seaming the sucker this time. Even though I hate seaming with a passion.

I'm also working on a lace stole, knit side to side. Can't say much more than that.

To Add, or Not to Add...

I've been working on a pattern called the eyelet blouse. It's driving me nuts. I'm finally (really finally!) close to the end... and I've hit a snag.

My design calls for a bit of lace to be worked on top of the bust, with little gathers underneath it. The gather's aren't hard to work. I knit a row of purl stitches along the front where I wanted the panel to start, and I picked up and knit a small portion of them. This creates little gathers where I skipped over stitches. Unfortunately, this also means that I simply don't have enough fabric for the bust. I'm tempted to ignore it completely.

I mean really, is stockinette that bad? It has lace sleeves and will have lovely ties at the back with ribbon around the top to pull the neckline in, like a peasant top. Does it really need that extra lace?

I don't think so, and it's MY pattern! I think I can change it whenever I want.

Thanks, blog, for listening!

In Which I Discover I am a Huge Sucker for Lace

I love lace. Really I do. It's like my love affair with the internet: I love it to the point of distraction, but then I really do get distracted and hate it for a while. So I suppose it's more of a love/hate relationship than anything else.

Well, in March I decided I would design my own lacy tee after I discovered that when I went to knit the Victoria Tank, I really hated it. My tee would have lace around the bottom, a stockinette body, a lace panel sewn on over the bust, and floaty, lacy cap sleeves. So I knit on. At six stitches to the inch, I didn't realize just how long I would have to knit stockinette in the round before I got to the underarms. I am an idiot.

So now I'm at the underarms... and I've condemned the project to the knitting basket. I hate it right now. I love what I want from it. It's not like I hate the idea, but I simply cannot figure out how to go about the lacy, floaty cap sleeves to get them lacy and floaty enough. I also have no idea what to do with the lace panel on the bust. Construction-wise, that's all planned (since I plan on pitching this pattern to a magazine, sorry, not telling you. You'll have to wait). Pretty design-wise, not so much.

I'm a smart person, and you'd think I'd know better. You can't just rush headlong into a project without knowing this stuff. I'd even done the calculations for the sizing, but I simply hadn't figured out the lace.

I'm picking it up again today. Wish me luck because I don't have a clue if I'll have enough yarn, or enough sanity to finish.