Behold, my masterpiece!

This is seriously the best put together thing I've ever knit, except maybe the baby cargo pants. I am absolutely in love with this pinafore, and if it fit me, i'd totally wear it to work.

HOT.

Pattern: duh... Anouk!

Yarn: I used the Cascade Pima Tencel yarn called for in the pattern, mostly because I found it for a decent price here at One Fine Yarns, and I didn't have any better ideas. I'm so glad I did use it! It is INCREDIBLY soft and bright, and I really enjoyed working with it. The shop was out of the ruby red color for the flowers so I subbed yellow, and I think it turned out a lot brighter than it would have with the red. I'm happy with it because it just looks happy. The other thing I want to note about One Fine Yarns is that I ordered three balls of the orange, but the proprietor could only find two and what looked to be almost a full skein, but didn't have a ball band, so she emailed me and asked me if I'd rather wait for a full skein or else she would send me the third, unwrapped one for free. I took the free ball, of course, cause I figured that if I ran out of orange, I could just sub another color, but I have almost a full skein left! I only used two skeins (and a bit) of orange. I just thought that was really nice of her to even offer. I'll certainly use her again. She sent candy too.

Notes on the pattern: I wish it said somewhere on there that this pattern was NOT a dress, but instead a pinafore. I know I could just seam up the sides. In fact, until tonight, when I just got tired of seaming little bits together, I thought that was exactly what I was going to do. I worried though about making the opening too small, and seaming it up wrong, and otherwise screwing it up, so I decided to leave well enough alone. But I probably wouldn't have made it if I'd known it wasn't a skirt. I was half way through before it dawned on me to check the internet for other peoples' finished Anouks. And in most of the pics, they are flat, just like mine. There are only a couple of shots of the damn thing actually on a kid, so it's really hard to tell, just like in the picture on Knitty. I did enjoy the intarsia though.



Hot damn, that looks good! I'm sure it isn't perfect and if an experienced knitter who'd been doing color work for a long time took a look at it, I'm sure I would get very critical feedback (constructive, of course), but it looks way better than I ever hoped.

Anyway, I gave it a spritzing, and it's blocking now, mainly to even out the neckline and side bands. All that is left is to find five matching buttons, sew them on and wrap that sucker up.

Next up, I'm knitting a sweater from my new Louisa Harding book. I just bought yarn for it today, in about five minutes at my LYS (near work) right before they closed. I'm not using the organic cottons that are called for in the book, mainly because the store doesn't carry them and I only had about five min to make a decision. Tomorrow or so, I'll show you what I picked instead, once I get a chance to take a picture of it. I was so busy tonight that it is 11pm, Spanky is home, and I want to get some time with her before she has to get up a 4am again for work. Yes, kids, this is the glamorous life of film production. I wouldn't wish it on anyone (unless it was the actor's job... that's a CAKE WALK 75% of the time).

I'll leave you with a shot from our weekend car trip. It was a beautiful day on Sunday, and we drove up past Hoboken just to see it mainly. You're looking at Manhattan and the Empire State Building (almost directly in the center) from Hamilton Park (I think that was the name of it) in Weehawken, NJ.