Whew...I made it.

Last week, as my friends and I were innocently wandering through Stitches South, minding our own business, bothering no one, suddenly out in front of us appeared The Most Beautiful Skirt Ever. We asked the woman wearing it if we could take a photo of the skirt, and she said that we could.

She turned out to be a saleswoman/enabler for Fine Points Inc. of Cleveland, Ohio. An hour and a half later, two of us had bought the yarn required to make the skirt.

These are the best photos I have found of the skirts, but they really do not do the skirts justice.

The short version:

The long version:
Making this skirt involves knitting an underskirt with Louet Euroflax (100 % Wet Spun Linen) which is a whole lot like knitting with waxed dental floss. I am not exaggerating here. It's stiff, bendable and not at all nice to knit with. It also tends to spring off the needles when I'm not looking. However, after it is washed and dried IN THE WASHER AND DRYER! it is soft and drapy.

The underskirt is all knit in stockinette except for the occasional purl row which is used to pick up stitches from to knit each of the tiers. Each tier is made from a different Claudia Hand Painted Yarn. The colors are gorgeous and it took an hour and a half to go through the various color combinations. The bonus? Claudia herself was there to help.

But yesterday, I started the project, and spent last night at knit night so immersed in struggling with the waistband that I barely knew what else was going on around me. And then this morning, more of the struggle.

Notice all the needles..........

We sock knitters always try to convince those would-be sock-knitters that you only knit with two needles at once, so they should not be intimidated by the porcupine-like mess of four double pointed needles they see us working with. This part of the project involved three circular needles - with their six points - each needle of a different size (no idea why, I was just following directions) and because I had had to take the live stitches off of a provisional cast-on length of waste yarn, I had to hold a crochet hook in my mouth to pick up all the ^&*() dropped stitches that manoeuvre had caused.

It was a mess. The goal was to knit the two long sides of the band together to form a casing for elastic. It took me over three hours to finally accomplish this. Did I even know if I had the same number of stitches on each needle? Did I even know if I had the required 205 stitches when I finished? Did I bother to count???

No, I did not. It was all I could do not to throw the whole thing into a very long time out.

But I persevered and this is the result:




The rest (until I tackle the tiers) is brain-dead easy (and probably just as boring). Just stockinette stitch on size 4 needles for 40 inches.

NOW I'll count the stitches.

And with any luck, there will be 205...but if not, I know how to increase or decrease...(in other words - cheat!)