Christmas flowers

This fall my cousin had a baby girl and I had the perfect excuse to knit a cute little dress.

What: Sproutlette dress / Tanis Lavallee

How: Circular needle 3.25 mm

From: Canon Hand Dyes William Sock, 88 g

I've seen so many wonderful dresses made from this pattern that I've been just aching for a reason to knit one myself.

The only problem was yarn! Oh yes, you would think that there would be some yarn for any project among my 30 kg stash - but no. At least not if I might need more than one skein. Crisis! Finally I browsed through everyone else's projects on Ravelry and found out that one skein should be enough for the smallest size. However, I had heard from a friend that the sizing of this pattern is a bit tight so I would have to modify as I go.

I went trough my stash and selected the fingering weight skein that had the most meters in it and bravely set forward to knit. This delicious raspberry colored yarn is one the prize yarns from Tour de Sock two summers ago. It was just the perfect amount of sweetness without being too girly.

The dress is knitted top down seamlessly. First, you knit the garter stitch raglan top with a leaf motif in the front. It was nice but I found an error in the chart. Well, the chart worked as it was but there was one row with more decreases than increases and it caused me to have two sts too little after the raglans. I just added them on one row after the chart and it doesn't show too much in the finished dress.

The back has a slit to make dressing up easier. The sleeve sts were left on holders for later and then you would add a ton of stitches for the skirt part. The skirt was endless rows of boring stockinette, and then finally more garter stitch with leaf motifs. The whole thing was finished off with a lacy bind off. Though, I had to stretch the holes quite a bit the get my dress to look like the ginger bread edging of the sample photos.

Because I was warned about the sizing, I started off with the largest size. It wouldn't be very nice if you could only wear the dress for a few weeks, no would it? However, since the largest size would use more than one skein of yarn, I decided to knit the stockinette stitch skirt a bit shorter. I was aiming for the skirt length of the smallest size but it turns out, I'm apparently not very good with the measuring tape. In the end the hem was shorter than it should've been even for the smallest size and as a result, I was left with extra yarn. So things didn't quite go as planned but I did manage to knit a super cute dress.

I was saving this post for after Christmas but I just heard a few days ago that certain someone had opened their presents beforehand! Yes, I'm talking about you!