A few months ago, my husband directed me to a post on the Freakonomics blog about Ravelry. A very intelligent and articulate young lady named Sarah Johnson wrote an article titled: A Young Reader Asks: Is There an Elitist Oligarchy in the Underworld of Knitters?
Sarah’s basic premise is that the difficulty ratings for patterns on Ravelry are skewed. Ravelry users can rank patterns on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the easiest to make and 10 being the most difficult. She noticed that out of nearly 43,000 rated knitting patterns, only 68 were rated a 9 or 10 and that the vast majority were between 1 and 4. So she was wondering is it that the vast majority of patterns are simple to make or is it that the only people ranking these patterns knitting geniuses for whom nothing is difficult?
I had never really thought about this question before and found it to be very interesting. I am one of those users who never ranks pattern difficulty. I guess I never really noticed that particular option. I am also what I would call an advanced knitter. I’ve been knitting since I was seven and have made some extremely complicated items so I’m pretty sure I would skew those rankings even more if I started rating patterns. Frankly, there aren’t many patterns that I would consider to be incredibly difficult. However, I just finished a baby dress that I think would fit into that category. It took me over a year to finish this project and I have to say that it was quite a challenge every step of the way.
A long time ago, I purchased a book called “Baby Knits from Dale of Norway”. I’m sure this book has been out of print for a long time. In fact, a quick search on Amazon revealed only two copies of this book, both selling for $90! This book has some of the most beautiful baby clothes. I love every single design in this book and have made many of them for the little ones in my life. However, I would have to say that almost every pattern is extremely difficult to make. The reasons are numerous: Very intricate color work, difficult shaping, steeks, complex finishing and pages of text directions. There are great photos of the outfits, but no photos of the details in the patterns to clarify directions.
Here are some photos of items from this book that I’ve made over the years:
My cousin Mirra wearing the ladybug sweater.
ladybug hat
duck sweater
In preparation for this post, I went to Ravelry to see what kinds of rankings the ladybug sweater received from the other users. Well, what do you know? Turns out that the vast majority of users have ranked this pattern as higher than a 4 and in fact 8 is the most common score by a long shot. So this is indeed a very difficult pattern as I thought. Glad I’m not totally wrong some of the time!
Which brings me to the present. About a year ago, I started a dress from this book for my little cousin Nicole. She was just born and I decided to make the pattern for a 12-18 month old. I’m so glad I did! I’ve never knitted a dress before and naively thought I would try some different color yarns in the skirt, including a self-striping blue, yellow and green yarn I had lying around and green and yellow handspun yarns. The dress has a lacy skirt with a plaid top. The original has a white skirt with a white and purple top. My idea was that the skirt would be 1/3 green, 1/3 multi-color and 1/3 yellow with a green and yellow top.
The skirt for the dress is a lace pattern that requires counting, so it wasn’t exactly mindless knitting since I had to pay attention. This is the type of knitting that I have very little time for due to my full-time job and busy weekends. I knit the green portion and then switched to the self-striping yarn only to find out that I was just a few stitches off on my calculations, but unfortunately that meant that the yarn wasn’t striping properly. So out came the entire green section that I had to re-knit.
Take two – I reknit the green third, then painstakingly knit one third with the self-striping yarn. This was a real challenge because the colors had to match up perfectly on all the rows, but the lace pattern had variable stitches in each row due to yarn overs and extra stitches. Finally, I decided to try my yellow and green handspun for the final third. I got almost all the way through and decided that the green and yellow handspun colors didn’t work at all. So I ripped them out.
Take three – I went to the yarn store. This in itself is a shocking turn of events. I haven’t been to the yarn store in a couple years since I spin almost all my yarn now and I’m actively trying to reduce my stash to a manageable size. But yes, I went to the yarn store and bought some lovely turquoise, green and yellow yarns to match the self-striping yarn. I completed the top of the skirt in the turquoise. Finally, I could move on to the plaid top, which I naively thought would be much easier!
The top – I managed to make it through the top even though it involved: steeks, complex color work including two color purling, shaping (at the same time as the steeks and color work) and somewhat confusing directions in parts. I actually didn’t have to rip out anything (surprisingly). However, just when I thought I was done, the finishing just about did me in.
The edging – the pattern called for very cute picot edging for the sleeves and neck. This involved picking up stitches around the neck and each sleeve, knitting the edging, folding it over and sewing it to the back. I picked up and knit the neck edging but when I folded it over, it really sagged and rolled over and looked very odd. Ugh.. I took it out and decided to do it all over again by picking up half the stitches. At this point, the neck edging looked good so I moved on to the sleeves. I finished edging one of the sleeves using the same method – picking up half the stitches and it looked fine.
And that’s when we went to our favorite Indian restaurant. We’ve been going to this place for ten years and the waiters treat us like family. I can always rely on their honest advice. Well, as soon as she saw the dress, one of the waitresses said to me “You realize that the sleeve openings are too small. If you have a small child, you will put shirts on under the dress so you need a lot of room so it’s not tight.” I saw that she was correct that the edging was pulling the sleeves in. Sigh.. so out went the sleeve edgings. I decided to do a fair isle style two color stripe rib edging. Here’s a photo of the edgings in progress with the picot edging on the right and the rib edging on the left. You can also see that the rib edging has a much larger opening than the picot edging.
Dress edgings
So, after all these challenges, I finally finished the dress and sent it off. It took a year to make it (with several other projects thrown in). I have to say this was one of the most difficult knits due to the fact that I re-knitted every part of it three times. But in the end, I think it turned out really cute! I hope Nicole gets to wear it a few times before she grows out of it.
Nicole’s dress
