Knitted Dress Fail & A New Project

Remember the dress I was knitting?

Well, to my horror and dismay it turned into a failure.

All this time I was afraid that, even though I loved the way the dress looked in the pattern's picture, I would end up not liking it when it was finished.

Well, that wasn't the problem. I actually love the dress, it's just as lovely as in the original picture. The problem turned out to be the size.

I never doubted the fit of the dress for one moment while I was knitting it. Naturally, knitting a whole dress takes a lot of time and yarn and you don't want to waste that. So I was careful, and, just as with any knitting project by the way, swatched and blocked my swatch, adjusted the number of stitches for a better fit and kept checking my tension while I was knitting. Everything went smoothly, my tension was spot on the entire time, after blocking everything measured what it should, some pieces were even slightly smaller... nothing to worry about.

Four weeks ago I finally finished knitting the last pieces and was ready to put it all together. After seaming up the major pieces (back, yokes, fronts, and 1 sleeve) I was eager to try it on and... discovered it was way, WAY too big. The waist was too big but not terribly so, the hips too, but the bust.. the bust was especially huge.

So what happened?

I immediately realized that the fault had to lie with the pattern, since I had been so careful and knew my tension was right. So I looked up the total number of stitches at the underarm and started calculating and discovered that, originally, the finished size of the dress at the bust was a whopping 40,5 inches. Say what?! That is supposed to fit a 32-34" bust and have a tailored fit?! My dress turned out smaller but it is still a good 5 inches too big.

I sat on it for a few days, wondering what to do next. Frog it? Try to fix it somehow with cutting and sewing? (Is that even possible if you need to lose 5 inches?) Finish it as is and sell it?
I didn't know. I was just so disheartened that I decided to put it away until I have the energy to come up with a plan.

I quickly turned to a new knitting project for comfort. I still had a lot of yarn left from the dress so I decided to knit up this lovely 1940s jumper that had been at the top of my Ravelry queue:


It's called In Vintage Tone and it is another pattern from the Australian Women's Weekly (posted about earlier here). It is knit in 4 ply. I had to change the tension quite drastically because the fabric turned out super stretchy so I made it to have about 3 to 4 inches negative ease (originally it had 0 ease). I've already finished the back and about 2/3 of the front. It is refreshing to finally knit something different than just stockinette stitch.

Please excuse the crappy iPhone picture.

Of course there is one big lesson I learned from all this: from now on I will always check the finished size before I start knitting. Too bad I had to learn it the hard way.