Faithful to my own promise I therefore invite you to join me on a somewhat painful, but ultimately triumphant, journey of getting the breast zone perfect for the (not quite yet) Red Day Dress.
As with all proper bespoke knitwear, there comes a point when a fitting is in order. And so I tried the dress on, only to realize that a crucial shaping designed to enhance the graceful female bust zone was slightly off :(
I immediately knew what, why, how and where went wrong, but the realization came to late. The picture below says it all: the positioning of nipples is off by about 5 sts; the markers indicate the correct positioning. This, obviously, will not do. This shaping's secret mission is to attract attention to one's breasts and it has to be PERFECT.
Having considered all my options:
- frog back all the way to the base of bust;
- surgically open the work just below the yoke and frog back to the base of bust, the advantage of which is that there would be less reconstructive work to do and the disadvantage of which would be grafting in a way that is completely invisibly joined - this could be passably accomplished but could not be done to perfection without MUCH fuss;
- frog only front section of work, meaning there would be no need to "fuse" grafted seam's threads.
Below you can see what the breast shaping does and what it looks like exactly:
Once option 3 was decided upon and carried out half-way the dress looked something like this:
One row into reconstruction:
Reconstruction under way and gathering speed, well, very s l o w speed - more of a rythm, really.
Unpicking unnerving pile of frogged custom plied spaghetti... This, by the way, is the proof that I have nerves of steel (however unconvincing my usual reaction to mess might be, characterized by complete absence of patience - actually, that might be because I use up all my patience in these difficult surgical operations performed on knitted fabric).
About 5 hours later...
And even now there is more touching up to do, as getting the gauge right is somewhat tricky in reconstruction work, and although for about half of the rows I managed to get it spot on, another half required more tedious picking at and evening out...
All in all, everything went to plan. I lost a day whilst at it. Those of you, who followed this tale from the beginning, know that I have set myself a timeline for this project - half-term break, which is NOW. I'm actually a little way away from the END. It's a cruise now though, through the last simple stage. I reckon I will have it all finished for the next weekend. Bear with me...
The dyeing workshop is due to be re-opened shortly after the finishing line is crossed on this one :) I am looking forward to this!
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