Red Leaves and Lace Tunic

This tunic piece began as an idea floating around in my head, with very little direction, I just started knitting it.  I am not a very fast knitter as I mostly am knitting while working out on the elliptical these days.  I sketched out a few ideas, and was making the leaves in between other projects.

I started this in November of 2011.  I knit to keep my hands busy while I'm out, watching a movie, helping on projects around the house.

The "lace" pattern is from a free Ravelry pattern, which is actually a hat knitted in the round.  The hat pattern is by Natalie Larson.  When I knit, I prefer to wing it.  Also, when knitting a pattern, I like mistakes and small messes.  For this particular pattern I intentionally knitted it while with groups of people talking, half-paying attention, so that I could get an organic looking jumbled mess in areas.  I revel in the fact that the majority of my work isn't perfect.

Piles of beaded leaves and messy excess thread (which I leave on to stitch the leaves together with).

Once the tunic was knitted, I had it living on my dress form in the basement for a while.  I pinned the leaves on to the dress form was I made them so I had a large grouping of them before I sat down to stitch them all together.

I created a paper guide on the dress form (with leftover pieces of construction paper) so I had something to line the leaves up to as I stitched them together.

Front: Stitched leaves and adding more in as they lay on the dress form.

Back: Stitched leaves and adding more in as they lay on the dress form.

This is the beginning when I didn't have very many leaves but wanted to get an idea of how many and where I was going with this piece.

The top two images are from Sunday morning.  I put it on for some quick photos before I took it over to be juried into Fiber Feast, the Fashion Show that the Ann Arbor Fiberarts Guild puts on every year.  This year it is April 14, 2012 at Washtenaw Community College, the Morris Lawrence Building.  Tickets are $28 per person and they are selling out fast.  Come see this hit the runway!  More info on the Ann Arbor Fiberarts Guild Website.