Finished Object Friday

Happy Friday!  Beautiful weather here, not too hot or humid yet, but still to warm for my finished object.  Why do we always finish things off season?

I designed this tunic myself.  It was a pretty challenging design.  I don't think I will ever write up the pattern because it took four tries to get the sleeves right so that the stripes matched at the armhole.  The thought of sizing that four times is not exciting.

A little on how I did this.  I bought this yarn, Berroco's Remix, during the yarn crawl last fall at a great price at Holley's Yarn shop.  I loved the color combination and I like how the mix of silk, cotton, and synthetics work together.  It is comfortable, plush but not too hot.  Since it was on sale, there wasn't enough to get one color for a sweater.  That made me think of stripes.  I was thinking of how Missoni does the chevron stripes and I wanted a tunic with three quarter sleeves.

First I had to figure out the color sequence.  I used a ruler and wound samples of different sequences to see what I liked.

 I didn't want the stripes to be the same size but wanted to vary their size.  I had read an article years ago about using Fibonacci series to come up with stripes.  The series is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc..  you add the last two numbers together to get the next number in the sequence.  To make it easier to knit I used 2, 2, 4, 6, 10.
First try didn't speak to me on color order.

 Actually this might have been the first try when I would actually do stripes one row high - in flat knitting, what was I thinking?

Third try.  This is what I went with.  So there are four colors and five stripes so you get a more complex looking design.








Then I thought about the actual stitch pattern.  After research, I found two ways that chevron stitches are made.  The first is with yarn front and back for the increases and the other uses yarn overs for a lacy effect.  I decided to use both.  The 10 row stripe is in yarn overs.  The others have the yarn front and back to make chevron - except the second stripe of two rows.  That stripe I did in a two garter row stitch.  I had seen that combined with chevrons on some pillows and really liked the addition of texture.

Might be hard to see all the texture but i like how the second two row stripes stand out in garter and the biggest stripe that is ten rows is lacier from the yarn overs.

Construction wise I did it bottom up, flat in tunic length with a v neck and ribbing around the neck.  The body and 3/4 sleeves don't have ribbing at the bottom.  I just blocked the points so they would stay.

All in all, I'm very satisfied with it.  It was a long project but worth it.

Head over to Tami's and Wisdom begins in Wonder to see other great projects.