A Blessing Gown for Ila

I'm a pattern follower.
Truly, I am.
And, I'm bad at math, which makes me a poor candidate, I think for designing knitwear of any kind.

Until I have to.

I am a connoisseur of fine knitting patterns, include quite a collection of vintage ones.  But even with the pattern index on Ravelry, I could not find exactly the pattern I wanted.  I had modified one for my previous blessing gown, so I figured I if I did it once I could do it again.

No problem, right?

Here's how it's gone so far:

I spent my entire pregnancy just looking at patterns, not actually knitting on a gown.  I built up quite a nice Pinterest board full of inspiring ideas.  But really, I figured I'd probably have a boy (things lead towards the boy side in our family) and I figured it would waste time to get started just-in-case.

But of course, I didn't have a boy.  I spent the first few days just being thrilled by the fact that I had a lovely girl!  I spent the next three weeks knitting samples.  The week after that, I ordered a beautiful pattern online.  The week after that, I decided it wasn't exactly what I wanted, so I started drawing designs.

So that the gowns would be different, I bought some crazy-amazing and expensive silk yarn.  It arrived and was beautiful (and expensive!) and then immediately I changed my mind and wanted to use plain cotton #10 crochet thread like my other gown.  It costs about $2.99 for a cone.

So you are getting the picture.  At four weeks postpartum I still hadn't even started! And all this time I should have been knitting.

I started the gown, then after about 3 inches of Horseshoe Lace decided against it and ripped it out. Nice one!  My husband was thinking that I was truly crazy.

Needless to say, after ripping and re-knitting, and ripping and re-knitting, I finally made some progress.

I found myself:

Knitting while nursing

Knitting while the baby slept

Knitting at the dinner table

Knitting at the doctor's office

Knitting in the car, waiting to pick up and drop off my kids

Knitting on our summer road trips

On the Ferry from Port Townsend

Knitting my way through A&E's Pride and Prejudice, yes, the one with Colin Firth.  I wonder how many times I've seen that.  Ahem.

Then I found myself:

Ripping out

Ripping out again

Dropping stitches and picking out stitches.

Easing the stress of it all by listening to my Funk station on Pandora.

Stopping the Funk music because it was way too distracting!

And changing my mind over and over again.

But finally, I am making progress; I'm almost to the finish line!  At this point, I am so sick of knitting this, I swear I'm not going to want to knit anything ever again (but I will, and soon).  I have only three more days to finish.  Here goes, folks.

Sharing today with Ginny's Yarn Along.