Dummy

I was helping my friend rearrange her garage this weekend. By 'helping' I mean 'sitting on a bistro chair, watching her work'. She did a bang-up job, and I'd like to think that my moral support played a role. Anyway, while she was working in the dark recesses of the storage space, I knit the cowl of my Adrienne Vittadini sweater.

"Hey, cool dress form."

[From the back of the garage] "Do you guys remember giving us a shitload of grass seed?"

"What? No, not grass. Dress! I said 'cool DRESS form'."

"Yeah, and I'm holding a bucket of GRASS seed full of mouse droppings."

"Not something we'd do, giving you an open bucket of grain to put in your unused garage. We're not stupid, you know..."

The look I got? Oh, the look I got for that one. Because of course what was hanging at the end of that sentence, unsaid but certainly understood, was "...and if it wasn't us and it wasn't you, and we both know it wasn't here when you moved in, my money's on your husband doing it, which makes the months of him blaming you for the rodent problem because you left a single package of Cup-O-Noodle and a bag of Tootsie Pops out here really, REALLY funny."

"...but hey, when I'm done with my sweater can i borrow your dummy so that i can take pictures, because i think it's my size?"

She retreated back into the garage with her bucket of whole-grain mouse crap.

So, the details of the pullover. This is the Camille cowl shell from Adrienne Vittadini 27. I knit the small, and I didn't make any adjustments. I used eight whole balls and about three feet of the ninth to bind off the cowl. If I'd unraveled the swatch, I wouldn't have needed to use the ninth ball. The body was knit on birch needles, and the cowl was knit in the round on Addi Turbos. It took a little over a week to do, and I knit most of it while watching the first season of 'The Wire'.

The Camille yarn was easy to work with once I got the hang of pulling the slubbies through the stitches, but hard to seam. I should have seamed with a matching, smooth yarn. I knew once it was put together that I'd never be able to get it apart again, so I plunged forward and hoped for the best. Weaving in ends? I knew it wouldn't matter if I did it invisibly, because the yarn's so knobby that you wouldn't be able to tell. I put the tails through the eye of the needle, pulled through a few random stitches, tied knots, you name it. I'm sure it's not pretty, but then again, I'm not sure that even I can see where I did it, so it doesn't matter.

Oh, and the dress form isn't exactly my size. Its waist is about five inches smaller than mine, so the shell looks better on it than it does on me. Why? Because every night I make the split-second decision to drive home and knit instead of going to the gym. Dummy.