a new Oriental Lily

Can you believe it's almost two years ago since I first finished the original Oriental Lily ?  Wow!  That also means that Lily is now two years older, and yep, you guessed it, that dress is no longer tunic length. It's actually even getting a bit short for jumper length, and let's not mention the sleeve lengths.  It still fits her in the chest though!

We've been talking about making a new one, we even had the yarn all purchased. So last weekish I started knitting it up.  It was interesting knitting a design that I wrote the pattern for nearly two years ago, at times I had to resist the urge to rewrite the pattern. That's the tricky part about visiting old patterns, you've developed since then and always seem to find ways to improve it. But you know, I'm not going to. There's over 500 versions of this on Rav and it has a pretty good rating so it must be alright... and I really really like that it's a free pattern still. That's sort of important to me, as a reminder of how far I've come in such a short time with this pattern writing stuff.

Anyway, when it came down to it there wasn't that much I changed with the pattern to be honest, just some minor twiddling to modify it.   Lily still measures the same in the chest as she did two years ago, so I knit the same size as the original with a couple of little mods to cater for her longer body.

Despite all that knitting knitting knitting for all that length, this took me about 10 days to complete. I'm very very happy with how it turned out. Even better is the fact that Lily LOVES it. She had to put it on straight away, which is massive as usually I get a "Later Mummy!"  And she kept it on all day, begging to wear it to kindy. Yep, I let her.

I totally adore this colour combination, the blue is just perfection on Lily's colouring.

The variegated yarn is a yarn cafe yarn, you've probably heard me banging on about Elissa's yarns enough to know that I adore her yarns.  This one is Four Bags Full merino 8ply, colourway 'Maia Jade'.  300g of this colourway went into this dress.  As testament to Elissa's skills is the fact that the two skeins matched perfectly. Generally when you're knitting with hand-dyed yarns, two skeins of the same colourway may not always match perfectly. Dyeing is an inexact science, and dyers will often recommend you alternate skeins. Most knitters, particularly lazy ones like me, don't.  In this instance I started knitting the bodice with the 100g skein hoping it would do the bodice and sleeves and I could start the skirt with the 200g skein using the obi to break up the dress in case the two skeins weren't closely matching. 100g wasn't enough but it didn't matter as the two skeins were perfectly matched!!! YAy!!

Funnily enough, Mum has just finished knitting Tully a rainbow dress in this colourway.  It's kind of cool that the girls have kind of matching dresses. I know they will love it.

If you want some more details on the mods I used to make this dress or you want to see some more pics of this gorgeous girl in this dress, you can find them on my Rav project page here .  You don't have to be a member to have a peak at this one.