FO: Orangina

Presenting Orangina:

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This is the last surprise FO for awhile, I promise. Remember when I said in my last post I hadn't blogged awhile because of some major facepalm moments? And that one of them entailed a major gauge error? Well, that would be the summertime tunic.

I kind of fudged the gauge swatch and never realized it because of the way it was bunched on the circular needle. I worked on it at the beach, at the movies, while reading the last Harry Potter book, and then I checked it. It was about 10 inches long and I was all "hmmm, I wonder if it's time to start the armholes," so I put it on scrap yarn. And then I was like, "my hours of long, tedious work have created a gigantic, shapeless sack....DAMN YOU, GAUGE! DAMN YOU AND YOUR SICK, TWISTED SENSE OF VENGEANCE!"

It was literally 10 inches long by about 48 inches wide. And I admit I am a bit busty, bit I'm no Dolly Parton. So after carefuly measuring gauge as if I had just made the world's biggest gauge swatch on purpose, I ripped it all out and sat on the yarn for a few days, humbled by the defeat. I also came to the conclusion that the summertime tunic would probably look terrible on me anyway, and make me look more frumpy than carefree. I'd bought the orangina pattern awhile ago and decided to use the yarn for that instead.

Yarn - 5 skeins of Knitpicks shine (60% pima cotton, 40% modal, 110 yards), sport weight, in cherry. This yarn is awesome! It's really soft, and (perhaps not shockingly) shiny, and totally worth getting since it's super-cheap. The downside is that I have 4 skeins of this yarn leftover, and I'm not really feeling making another tank top out of the same exact yarn.
Needles - 29" size 6 Inox circular, which gave me a gauge of 20 sts x 28 rows = 4 in stockinette.
Pattern - Orangina by Glampyre. I'm apparently working through her entire catalog. The gauge I got was significantly looser than what was listed in the pattern so I calculated the number of stitches needed to fit my bust size (200ish) and made the size that came closest to that number (XS, with 206 sts). Here are my other mods:

• I worked it bottom-up, not top-down as written. I did this mostly to start in the round and to get the ribbing out of the way. I also wanted to eliminate seaming and be able to kitchener the shoulders together.
• I made the ribbing 5" long and the lace section 16" long, which is longer than specified for the XS size.
• I have tiny, wee little shoulders. They also slope down kind of dramatically. This means that I have issues with bra straps falling down, the straps of shirts and dresses being to long, and that I get a weird wing effect with square cut tops that have no armhole shaping (like this one). When it came time to separate the front and back to make armholes, I bound off 5 sts and then alternated knitting 1 row plain and decreasing 1 sts on the edges until a total of 9 sts were decreased on both sides. I basically eliminated and entire lace repeat this way.
• I grafted 3" of the shoulders together instead of 2".