I feel like everyone who engages in some kind of handcraft has this project.  In fact, I’d warrant most of us have several.

The Project That Got Away.

In a manner of speaking, anyway.  It’s that project that just didn’t turn out quite right, despite the fact that you felt the whole time you were making it that you were making good design decisions and were generally on the right track.

Oh, how wrong you were.  You finished said project—or maybe you didn’t.  Maybe it’s still stuck in the limbo of completion, crying out for justice.  In any case, it’s laid somewhere hidden away, unused and unloved for minor little faults that for one reason or another rendered it unworthy of showing to the public.

I have a handful of these things.  Sweaters tend to be the most susceptible to the syndrome for me.  I usually just hem and haw and make excuses for not wearing them, but after awhile I’ll give them away to someone who won’t care about the glaring problems I perceive when I look at them.  I rarely rip them back and try again, because the very idea of the effort involved makes me feel faint.  My eyes are rolling back in my head right now just considering it.

If I do screw my courage to the sticking place and throw something to the frog pond, it’s very likely it will languish there a good long time before I get around to reducing the offending finished object back into its kinked-up yarny beginnings.  Just ask my cotton camisole.

But every once in awhile, a Project That Got Away will begin whispering to me in a soft, sweet little voice.  It will remind me of all the reasons I started said project to begin with, and how the yarn I used is too lovely to be hidden away in chest or closet, but should feel the sun and garner some praise.

The current siren pouring its mellifluous mutterings in my ear is this:

 

The Butterfly Dress

A beautiful lace sheath dress knit in some gorgeous Sundara Yarn Silk Lace (colorway Poppy, for those interested parties).  I loved this pattern and the yarn, but I made a real muddle of it.  I have a terrible tendency to underestimate the give of yarn and to overestimate the amount of space that my person takes up.  I am getting more and more comfortable with the concept of negative ease, but this project was certainly a sacrifice to that learning.  The lace pattern has a lot of stretch, and I should have knit it a size smaller to get more of the body-skimming effect that the designer intended.

Also, despite knitting the edging along the bottom as instructed, it’s far too narrow for the rest of the dress.  The silk gives a lot laterally, but not so much vertically, and the result is that the edging sort of binds the bottom and creates a very bag-like effect.  Do not want.  I also tried some trickery with the shaping at the waist and the top that just didn’t work.  I wore this dress once to a wedding, and while it got tons of compliments, I just didn’t feel in it the way I thought I should.  I felt like a frump.  And one should not feel like a frump when wearing a lacy silken sheath over a vintage satin slip.

So I’m making plans in my head.  I have quite a bit of the yarn left (enough to probably start the project and get a ways in before even needing to rip any of the work I already did).  I want to do a really proper swatch this time around, and test a few of my wacky ideas in a blocking bath before I undertake a whole garment again.

I do have another wedding to attend in the fall.  I wonder if I’ll be showing up in The One That Got Away.