Hatchling

I have a secret, blog friends. I’ve been keeping something from you.

It’s nothing personal! I just started working on a project, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it in the grand scheme of things, so I was keeping it to myself. I’m still not sure what sort of end game I’m going for with this thing, but it’s been lingering for a little while and I’ve had this constant, nagging thought that if I blogged about the project, then I’d get back into the swing of knitting it, that I’d rediscover the joy of figuring out a design as I’m going along, that I’d finally sit down and do the damned math to figure out the decreases in a yoked sweater dress.

Yep. Sweater dress. A purple seamless yoke sweater dress with elbow-length sleeves.

Don’t look at me like that. Here let me distract you with a picture.

(Yep, someone had some fun with Polyvore. PS, that’s totally Thea Colman’s new Gibson Girl top in purple; I’m still debating the collar treatment but when I saw her purple top with it’s portrait collar, I got a little buzz of excitement, so I may be borrowing her idea.)

I have decided that, for the time being, there is not going to be a pattern at the end of this. Rather, there are going to be (hopefully) detailed notes and “here’s what I did” stories so that if you just have to have your own knitted sweater dress (and really, who doesn’t? ::crickets::), you can recreate this process on your own, with whatever yarn you choose in whatever color you chose—though I have to say, purple is a pretty flattering color.

For my own purposes, I’m using Quince & Co’s Chickadee in the Frank’s Plum colorway. This “sport weight” (quotations because it’s SUPER lofty and not tightly spun, so I’m actually knitting it at DK weight gauge and getting the perfect fabric) was actually really affordable for the fourteen skeins I bought (who knows how many yards a sweater dress takes?!), and so far I’m really pleased with how it’s turning out!

Hopefully later this week I’ll be back with notes on how I began the process of planning this sweater dress. My goal is to provide a usable “template” for other people to try out the process of designing your own garments, but part of this will rely on questions from the audience, so if you have any questions at all along the way, pipe up!