Many years back, I was in Fabricville in Sherbrooke with my daughter and I saw a knitting book for sale with the most amazing garments in it. I needed to buy it. It was a French translation of the above-mentioned book, Tricot tendance, but I figured my grasp of that language was good enough that I could figure it out. I was wrong. The language of French knitting is obtuse, indecipherable and non-intuitive. The token francophone in my knitting group prefers English patterns because they are so much easier to read. As a result, Tricot tendance was cracked open only so that I could admire the patterns I figured I would never knit.
Fast forward a couple of years when I was visiting my daughter in Toronto. We made a trip to the Purple Purl and on a whim I asked the store clerk if she had Sensual Knits by Yahaira Ferreira. She did not, but she could order it and mail it to me in Quebec. So I plunked down my debit card and not too long after got my very own copy and gave Tricot tendance to my daughter, whose French really is much better than mine. The first pattern I attempted was “Lily-of-the-Valley Opera Gloves” by Olga Buraya-Kefelian. I had knitted one all the way to the wrist when I found the on-line errata for the bobbles, so I ripped back to the cuff and redid it. They turned out quite nice and I wore them for the premiere of my husband’s opera. They are opera gloves, after all.
I was on holiday in the Caribbean at the time, hence the shorts and sandals. That jade bracelet met an untimely end on that trip when it fell on one of those polished stone floors and shattered. I was quite devastated.
Recently I purchased way too much yarn from KnitPicks during one of their sales, including four different colourways of Diadem fingering. It’s a problematic yarn: gorgeous in the skein, but not so great once you get down to working with it. It’s soft and silky (50% baby alpaca-50% silk) but has barely any twist to it and fuzzes terribly. My first attempt at winding some off the swift into a cake resulted in a horrible tangle that took me an hour or more to tease apart. The fingerless mitts I knit with it lost all their sheen after they’d been washed and blocked, and stretched so much that I had to undo the ends and make them smaller. So I figured that Diadem would be more suited to something else, and hit upon the “Pink Sundae Camisole” by Angel. It’s been in my Ravelry queue for a long time, just waiting for the perfect yarn to come along.
My first attempt at joining in the round resulted in a möbius strip. As a result, I started again by knitting five rows and joining for the picot round. Five rounds later I rescued the live stitches from the provisional cast-on and made a nice finished picot edge. Then my problems began in earnest.
Because of my experience with the first ball of Diadem I wound, I was very careful to wind my unravelled yarn onto an empty toilet paper roll. I’m glad I did.
Very carefully, I reknit the lace round. This time I was missing two stitches. I figured I could live with that. After the second round of eyelets, I made a kfb into one yo at each side, bringing me back to the right number of stitches. Suddenly it looked huge. I see from the picture that it fits over the model’s hips, and I’m making the medium size, which is what’s shown in the photo. So it should work, right?
Tune in, folks, for the further adventures of the Pink Sundae Camisole.
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