Queen Anne's Lace

Finally!  I know a lot of you have been waiting to see this finished!  And so have I!  Thanks to being stuck in the house the week before last to wait for my HVAC guys, I powered through and finished it up, spending a whopping 5 hours that day finishing the second sleeve, weaving in all the ends, cutting the neck steek and picking up the neckband stitches, and finally knitting and tacking down the neck.  By the time I finished, I was too tired to be elated!

As you can see, while it is a gorgeous piece of knitting, it's not the most flattering of garments.  I knew that going in - I mean, it's square dropped shoulders!  I did reduce the sizing from the smallest size by one pattern repeat (I worked 7 repeats around rather than 8).  This shaved about 5" off the circumference of the sweater - one pattern repeat is the width of one of those diamonds you see.

What with all the progress posts and videos along the way, I don't think I need to say much else!  If you want to look back on any of it, you can click the Starmore button in the category cloud at right.  My Ravelry notes are minimal, as the only change I made was to the stitch count on the body.  I used all the original yarns and colors used by Alice Starmore - you don't mess with perfection!

You can see here how wide the sleeves are.  The 40" final bust measurement fits me perfectly in the hips.  Ahem.  If I were to do it again, I'd make the sleeves narrower, but that's really the only other change I'd make.

Here are two photos that show the patterning well, although you've seen it ad nauseum by now.  I decided after seeing these photos that super pale lipstick does me no favors ;-)  It looks like I have no lips!  So I switched back to red for the last few.

Yes, the sweater makes me look a lot heavier than I am.  But that's OK; you can't believe how cosy this thing is.  Scratchy, yes.  But so lightweight and WARM!  Toward the end, working on it was the same as having a snuggly blanket on my lap, which is why no knitting on this happened over the summer.  I'll likely be wearing a chambray shirt under this, but for these pics I just tossed it on, as I was doing a marathon photo session that day.  You can probably tell that by the time I got to this sweater, the light was gone.  But I think you get the idea.

I have a good idea what my next Starmore will be - oh yes, there will be more in my future!  Take a gander at some of her newer designs on her website.  I'm thinking of giving myself a kit for my next birthday :-)