So.....I have an enormous amount of fancy tiny yarn I've been acquiring at fancy yarn festivals and the occasional shop trip for several years now, most of which I haven't done anything with. I have colorway COLLECTIONS of this stuff.
Neon
I'm not sure what to label this collection, but it's .... pale rainbow-ish shimmery, I guess? Possibly not everything that qualifies in this is even in this shot.
More rainbow rainbow (this isn't even ALL of the stash of that)
And pink/purple/blue (rainbow and pink/purple/blue are my life's colorways).
This is because I want to make more dresses out of fingering yarn, and the tank/tube-style dress I want to make I have (a) not been able to design myself, and (b) the closest pattern I've got doesn't get gauge even remotely with the fingering yarn it supposedly uses, forcing me to recalculate or substitute something else or god knows what. (Other people have agreed with me that the gauge is insane.) i just took a class in recalculating this for another gauge because I come out at about 28 sts/4 inches with size 5's in fingering, or 28 sts/4 inches if I really wank it and use size 8 needles. The pattern's gauge is at 22, which is worsted weight, FFS.
Meanwhile right now I'm knitting with the 28/4 gauge with fingering on the Isabela top. I did the collar and I finished (most of) one sleeve and am on to the next. And you know what? That shit's STILL flimsy AF really. Like, I wanted to make a lightweight summer dress out of these things because it gets to be like 116 here, but if I knit it at that gauge I'll probably still need to wear some other dress under it or else embarrass myself. If you hold it up to the light, it's a bit peekaboo still. The crochet dress is definitely peekaboo, which is why I have clothes under it and have mostly worn it in midseason temps here and there.
Maybe I should just give up and knit 2 yarns together and do it in DK gauge? That uses more yarn (but has awesome color combos that could harmonize, particularly on the neon) and knitting with two seems like a pain, but that might be less of a pain than working in one strand of tiny. I did also find a way to knit with 3 fingerings at once (folding them up and weaving a third strand through...it worked) to come out around worsted/bulky gauge. Works a treat, albeit it was quite heavy fabric and not what I was going for in a "summer" dress.
Argh, I dunno. I still have Halloween costume I'm plugging away on and a portable project and a pain-in-the-ass-I-may-never-finish-it double knitting to work on, plus the vest that is on hold because I got sick of the fiddly lacy hem. So...yeah.
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