Category: Hand painted knitting (with dyes)

Why a Dress?

Why not?

Is the glib answer. But for me it is a statement about what I am starting to discover about myself and my relationship with the world right now. Now that was the weighty answer. Reality is always somewhere in the middle.

Over the years I have seen several dresses knit by customers, often with my help interpreting instructions and working out gauge issues. These dresses often looked and felt heavy to me. On-line I have seen the most stunning knitted wedding dresses. Made with love from lace stitches and many hours of knitting.

Many knitted dresses are simply a long sweater worn as a dress with leggings. The concept of knitting a dress like this for myself was kind of ludicrous. I am short, quite rounded and I have always thought that a knitted dress, especially a sweater styled dress usually clings, making it look its best on on tall willowy types. I believed that I could never put a sweater dress on and not look foolish.

I am usually an optimist at heart, but not on this topic! I needed to rethink how I looked at my clothing choices.

I had already started to rethink my wardrobe in light of todays challenges with sustainability, examining the concept of slow clothes and the making and mending movements. Then I looked at my wardrobe for what I really wore the most often and what I had been putting my money into. I saw a huge difference between my Summer and Winter wardrobes.

In the summer I wear dresses. Longer, fuller dresses with cotton slips and lots of movement, quite often with vintage details. Several of which I had recently made for myself. I used to sew, in the past, and i am now refreshing my skills.

My winter wardrobe suffered by comparison. Most of my work pants were old except for the two pairs I had made myself. They don’t fit as well as I would like, but they are easy to wear and are made of wool or wool blend fabrics. My sweater and shawl collection really was what my winter wardrobe was all about. I didn’t wear dresses because they were never warm enough. I hate to be cold.

So why not knit a wool dress?

Boredom! The thought of all that plain knitting would drive me crazy. There is a reason why most of the things I knit are colourful, or textured with cables and patterns, or covered in lace patterns, or all three! I am often defeated by large swathes of stockinette fabric.

It only dawned on me recently that my dress didn’t need to be plain and it didn’t need to be heavy and I could wear it everyday in different ways. Sort of like the 100 day merino dress. Though I don’t think I could wear it 100 days in a row.

So I took some time to examine my summer dresses . What was working and why it was working. Every dress was shaped to the waist or an A-line shape. I wanted a shaped dress, not tight at the waist, but shaped and comfortable. I may look at A-line for my next dress.

How to create the shape? I thought about reversing a pi style shawl shaping for the skirt, but I think that might have been too full. I most definitely didn’t want to make a tube and then gather it to the waist, even with a lace weight yarn that is too much fabric sitting at the waistline.

I have knit myself a couple of sweaters that employed shaping around panels and thought that should also work for a skirt. Once decided, it was the matter of researching patterns and panel patterns in particular to create the way I wanted to go.

I am making a couple of adjustments. After 1 more 10-round repeat I moving my needle size down to 3.75mm from the 4.0mm. I have decided to combine physical shaping of the skirt with decreasing panels and the tightening of the gauge. This will make a smoother shape – I think. Everything is a bit of an adventure through this. I am lucky to have knit as much as I have and tried as many types of knitting as I have, it does allow me to make decisions based on experiences in the past. They may not all translate to this project, but they do help form a starting point.

Progress Report

I have knit up to the end of the chart and started my next 10-round repeat. After this repeat I will be changing my needle size. It is looking like each 10 round repeat adds approx 1.5 inches to the skirt when dry blocked. It may add a little more when wet blocked.

I am going to start designing the chart for the shaping panels this week (I have this week off from work and so have extra time). I am thinking that I will start by shaping out 1 panel out of every 3. And shape each of those panels over 40 rounds. I am hoping that this will be a slow enough to keep the shape from “belling out” and just be a smooth progressive line.

Belling out – the decreases are too quick and the dress suddenly looks like it has a line across the skirt where it has been gathered up. If it does bell – the knitting will need to be ripped back and the decreasing will have to be slowed down.

I have had a couple of people ask me why I choose Einband for my dress. They think of it as itchy. I chose it because I have used Einband before, for the Spring into Summer KAL, The Garden Gate Shawl. I was very pleased with the results from that project.

I had knit a shawl and then hand painted it with dyes. Once blocked the I found that the yarn holds the shape well. Something that I felt was important for this project. It also takes dyes beautifully and since I couldn’t decide on a colour before hand I am hoping to be able to decide after the knitting is complete! Maybe I will even paint the fabric with dyes and not immerse dye it. We shall see.

Happy Knitting

Lynette