Lockdown FO

I am cheating on this a bit and backdating it to when it was actually FO'd, although I have been waiting for pictures of its recipient wearing it to write about it. 

Such a little cutie, my niece!

Pattern: Crumpets

Yarn: 4 balls of Rowan Calmer - discontinued now; this has been in my destash for ages. 

Needle: 3.75mm - I should have gone up a size to 4mm, it ended up being pretty bullet proof

Mods: Very few. I knitted a beaded bind off instead of crocheting a picot edge because, as we know, crochet = dark art. Likewise, I avoided crochet straps and knitted on icord straps with little beaded ends. 

This pattern had been in my queue for about a decade - it was on the first page. I think I had intended to knit it for Jen's daughter Abi, who is now 10...possibly 11. The beaded bodice came out beautifully but it was pretty fiddly to knit. I was so looking forward to the skirt part, but then that had double the number of stitches and was boring as hell. The Calmer is splitty and feels weird to knit with, being ridiculously stretchy. I spent ages stringing beads for the bind off, only to come across a knot a few rows into the new ball; I cut and restrung, and then decided that the beaded bind off I liked to most was done with a crochet hook, so it was all for nothing.

So yeah, not my favourite thing to knit! - which is a shame, because this pattern goes up to 6 years and I'd love to make her another. Definitely not in Calmer, though. 

This bind off is divine, even if it did make me want to throw the garment across the room in frustration. It took 3 days. I slipped a bead onto a stitch, knitted it, slipped it back to the left hand needle together with the previous stitch, and k2togtbl. It's lucky she looks so cute in it, haha.