Fine Lines

Fine lines of conviction, smooth, silken, poured through loop after loop to become fabric.


Fabric which is incredibly wearable. Deceptively so. It moves. It forms across the body. It has it's own shape. It takes on shape. It has a lightness, and an ease. It has a wonderful sense of transparency, a veiled lightness. It is a layer, to be peeled at the edges, to be pulled and creased as you move, as you play with it (I dare you not to...), and as it gets worn.


I've blogged about the Process of this on my blog, so I wont double up here as well. I wanted to say more about what the Stainless Steel Jacket was like to knit, and to wear. This knit up reasonably quickly - having said that it's taken a few months, but that's more due to my lack of time than this being a long knit. Once you get into the stainless rhythm, you move through it quickly - it seems to grow before your eyes. The pattern is easy to follow, and has simple, but very nice shaping. The piece as a fabric whole is lovely - incredibly textural: I find myself pinching it and holding it through the day, running my fingers across it to feel it's very silky sheen. Yes, it has stiffness, but in a very fluid way. It does find the shape of your body, and at times it will hug that shape, at other times it will fall away from your body. It is a fantastic layering piece. The 12 tiny buttons from the top of the neck to 3/4 of the length give some weight to the piece, and some structure. My gauge was slightly off on this one - I was very much between needle sizes and chose the smaller needle, and decided not to compensate by altering stitch counts or length, except in the arms, and so this is slightly smaller than the medium pattern would be. I like the length of it though - I'm a layers person, and this works well with other pieces in my wardrobe as a marginally shorter top layer. There are a couple of Tsumugi silk weighting rows at the start of the arms and body, which I would probably have preferred to have left out, but I understand the job they do in giving the hems some rigidity, and hence definition. I also deleted the Tsumugi silk border up the front, but that was just my personal preference.

The real test is - would I knit it again? Yes, in a heartbeat.