Actual garment

Friday November 14, 2008 – 8:52 pm

Hey look what I made! My first actual garment that isn’t a scarf, hat or pair of socks. :-)

I’m doing the pattern Pretty in Pink by Amanda Reed. Not in pink of course, hence the name “Pretty In Tank”. I know it looks like I twisted that join, but I didn’t, it’s just the yarn being unruly.

Only 13 inches of K3/P2 ribbing to go! Might take awhile… :-)

It just baffles me how they can dye the yarn to make these magical stripes. It would make more sense to me if they knew how wide the knitted item would be, but they don’t. It’s just plain magic.

Somebody (JJ?) please tell me this is getting bigger. Because I’m just knitting and knitting and knitting and I could swear the damn thing is maintaining exactly the same size no matter how much I knit. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee talks about this "knitter’s black hole" phenomenon in her Casts On book. She says you need to knit as fast as you can in order to reach escape velocity, to get out of that black hole. Like, "I think I can, I think I can…"

It is not getting bigger, my hand is shrinking! Okay, it’s bigger. 10 inches now… I’m going to do another inch or two and then start on the boobie section.

Finally cleared the ribbing section! Boobies ahead.

Finally bound off the neckline and started the first strap. I had to deviate from the pattern a lot… or rather the pattern had errors which caused me to screw up a long time ago, so I had to do some stuff later on to try and compensate. I have serious doubts that thing is going to be wearable, much less flattering. But it was a free pattern, whaddaya want.

I still have to sew the straps onto the back, but I’m done with the knitting! And it is wearable… although, you can’t really wear a bra with it, unless you have the kind with the see-through straps. But I’m going to skip the bra and think of it as a handmade thermal undershirt. :-) The whole point was to get over my trepidation about knitting a full-size garment, and I’ve definitely done that. Having a semi-wearable item now is uhh… probably mostly coincidence, ha ha.

I finished my first actual garment, yayyyy!!! It came out pretty alright… I mean it doesn’t NOT fit me, so I’m quite pleased. ;-) Not that I would wear a hoochie-mama top like this by itself — I’ll put some kind of shrug or shirt-jacket or something over it, but for a little under-top it’s not half bad!

I’m all hunched over trying to get the camera pointed at the mirror pointed at my back… but you get the idea. I just wanted you to see how I did the straps — slightly angled, not quite a V-shape but not straight up and down either.