Indigo Flowers II

Cross-posted from my blog.


It's the weather. High temperature and high humidity had successfully prevented me from knitting anything for the past ten days. Instead, I spent my leisure time drawing, sewing, and reading art history books. When I finally picked up the smooth bamboo needles (last night), it was refreshing. The result, my friends, was this piece of Indigo Flowers.


The schematic sketches had been done a while ago. Shown here is the sketch for the sample. There is a bit of waist shaping, and the V-neck starts 2" (5 cm) below the sleeve openings.

There are several things to say about the design. Firstly it is done on two straight needles. I prefer knitting in the round, but when I am not 100% sure about the results--in this case it's the look and shape of the large lace panels--I work on straight needles to save time. Secondly, I started with a front piece instead of the back piece, for I have to see how the lace works at the shoulder, then decide how wide the back lace panel should be. Finally, the back neck shaping is undecided at the moment (see the question mark?); again it is because we are dealing with lace here, we just have to wait and see.


This vest has been sized up to 45" chest circumference, as I consider it a flattering piece for most women. Now that I have a large enough piece, I can see that the lace panel actually provides a lot of ease, and follows the curves smoothly. It seems unnecessary to change the shaping for larger sizes--it suits me well, I'm lazy ;-).

So far it has been smooth and easy, and my projection of the knitting time is surprisingly short (20 hours). I guess it's because of the needle size (US7, 4.5 mm) used. The very simple, 6 X 6 lace pattern has helped too. Only after I bound off the stitches for sleeve opening did I start to spend time thinking about how to distribute the decreases. After some sketching, I decided to decrease over the Calmer part until there are 6 stitches left, then decrease over the garter stitch border of the lace panel. Finally the outer most lace repeat will lose a few stitches--we'll be at the shoulder by then.

All right, that's all for now. I'll keep you updated ;-).

Iris

P.S. One of my friends pointed out that something's wrong with the photos. I have uploaded them again. Sorry for that.