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Thursday, September 11, 2008

Design Journey: Chickee's Dress


So, I went through my stitch dictionaries to find some stitch patterns for Chickee's First Communion Dress. I wanted something not on a grid (squarish), nothing too see-through, something that I thought I could increase and decrease, something I could make my own. Here are two swatches. On the right is the sc swatch. I have no idea why I always insist on doing a swatch in sc first. I guess it just gives me experience with the yarn, gives me a general feel for how stiff the yarn wants to be before I help it along with changing hooks and stitches. It's like a little warm-up. Both of these swatches are around 8" square. I stitched them, wrote down their sizes, the number of rows and stitches of each, tied knots in the tails to indicate which hook I used. (In this case, a "G" = 6 knots). In my notes, I noted that I used a "Bates" hook. (I do also use Boye hooks frequently).

These swatches are currently in the washing machine, then they will go into the dryer with the rest of the load of whites. The care of this garment is really secondary, because I really only expect Chickee to wear it one time, since it is a special occasion dress. Still, I want to see what will happen to it, and it's good experimenting for future projects.

This yarn is Plymouth Yarn, "Jeannee"
I started with this yarn for several reasons. It's 51% cotton, 49% acrylic. It's soft, it's bright white, it's dk weight, and I have BUNCHES of it in my stash. Let's just say it was slated for a different project, Plymouth helped me out, then the project didn't happen, and Plymouth said I could keep the yarn! So 'Thank You' to Plymouth yarn. It's the least I can do to give them a little plug. I will likely try out other yarns for this project, but really, since I have enough on hand to finish the whole project, I should try and use it. (I also like it). Let's see what happens when it gets out of the dryer. These 2 swatches have used an entire ball of yarn.

Next, I'm starting a new ball of yarn to make another swatch to play with the increasing/decreasing of the stitch pattern.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for this peek into the design process, it's really interesting.

Robyn said...

I love the tip of knotting your ends with the # of the hook size!