Years ago-- I can't recall how many and I can't find any pics from back in the day--I designed a cardigan sweater that has a built-in cape on top of it. This is entirely because I cannot figure out shawl wearing for anything short of the prom--shawls don't work well for me with having to carry stuff around. However, with this one I can move the strap of my purse underneath the cape and still have that capelike effect. It kind of looks like something old-fashioned.
However, it looked a little....dull... and plain. (Alas, I don't seem to have any photographs around to prove this and I didn't bother to take any beforehand.) So I got the bright idea to make butterfly appliques to sew onto the thing. I love blue morpho butterflies, so I spent a fair amount of time designing and spinning yarn to try to replicate the colors in a blue morpho (blues and purples). You can see the yarn here circa 2014.
I looked at various applique patterns online and then had some difficulties with them, so it became an unfinished object project. But per someone I'm acquainted with saying we should work on our unfinished projects (hers burned in a fire, so....), I decided to work on one for my Christmas vacation. I just finished it on the last day of. It's kind of hilarious that I thought it was going to take me something like three days and it took 16. I ended up taking out the appliques that weren't working, redoing other ones, and spending a lot of time making similar butterflies in different sizes. The tiniest of butterflies worked well in crochet, but the larger ones really needed to be knitted to look decent. I ended up using these patterns for the smaller butterflies.
I also had a terrible time making the giant butterfly on the back piece. I couldn't find any patterns that really worked for what I was doing and decided to adapt this one (worked in the round) into something flat. This did not go so well on the upper wings, as I could NOT replicate them looking exactly mirror image the same in flat stockinette. I redid them something like 5 times apiece, having drastically different weird angles and sizes not matching and god knows what, before finally deciding "Hey, these are around the same size, gonna just go with this." Perfect is the enemy of the good, etc.
See, here's a blue morpho to compare the yarn to.
Insert pandemic whine of "I can't take photos of my own damn back" here.
Front's not much easier to photograph alone either, sigh.
But hey, after an estimated.... seven?....years, it's finally done!
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