Remem­ber this cardigan?

 

I called it “the sea­weed cardi­gan”. It came from this pat­tern, and I took a fun pho­to of it, with me attempt­ing to imi­tate the severe look on the mod­el’s face, because I had a sim­i­lar hair­cut and used a sim­i­lar colour yarn, see?

 

Well, I unrav­eled it.

I tried “block­ing” it (and wrote all about it here), but who am I kid­ding, it’s acrylic, it’s not going to make a dif­fer­ence no mat­ter how much I soak it and how long I stretch it. I tried any­way and to my sur­prise it did stretch to a shape that fit for a moment — enough time for me to take a pho­to. And then when I took it out again after a few weeks I real­ized that it had shrunk back to its sad, mis­shapen self.

It does­n’t fit me prop­er­ly so it’s real­ly unlike­ly that I would wear it; I might as well use the yarn for some­thing else I want to make. The cardi­gan is real­ly a clever and beau­ti­ful design, I just did­n’t use the right yarn. Per­haps I will try again using a yarn with bet­ter drape.

So here’s the new mus­sels dress! :D (because the pat­tern is called “tunic with mus­sel pat­tern”)

 

 

It works for warmer weath­er too!

 

The pat­tern itself is pret­ty straight­for­ward but the way it’s writ­ten is a bit dif­fi­cult to fol­low. I had to unrav­el and restart sev­er­al times to under­stand its struc­ture. But after that I just kept try­ing it on as i went (a nice thing about a top-down pat­tern!) and made up my own stitch count, increas­es, etc.

Any­way, I’m quite hap­py with how it turned out :D Def­i­nite­ly some­thing I would wear often.

Some­times (or, more often than not) I’d make a gar­ment sim­ply because I’m intrigued by the pat­tern, and once I made it I’m not that inter­est­ed in wear­ing it. So, instead of keep buy­ing new yarn I’ve been check­ing my clos­et to see if I can har­vest any yarn for mak­ing new things.

So! Next week I’ll show you how a yeti turns into a hip­pie. Stay tuned! :D