It's been such a long time...

Lately I've been lured away by facebook, getting out all my little thoughts and dramas in succinct and slightly thoughtless blurbs. But I have had an Idea that will not be quelled and I think the process of working through the Idea is worth documenting in blog format. Anyway the genesis of the Idea began with Alexander McQueen.

As you all may or may not know Alexander McQueen killed himself on February 11th 2010. He was one of the most visionary and artistic fashion designers ever to send a dress down the runway and I actually cried when I heard he had died. I found his work challenging and beautiful and was continually inspired by it. I felt moved to examine my grief for his genius by trying to replicate his aesthetic in a knitted work of my own. I felt very driven to do this and haven't had this fevered a desire in a long time. I began by googling for retrospectives of his work and a few images really grabbed and stood out to me.

What really struck me as overarching theme in lot of his work was a certain historicity, body consciousness and emphasis on texture. I played these ideas around in my head and came up with this sketch.

You'll have to forgive my drawing ability, I'm terribly rusty as I haven't done any real drawing or sketching in years. But the idea is there. I feel like the Idea captures the body consciousness and the textural elements that I was going for. I don't know if anyone but me will ever see Alexander McQueen in it, but if I can pull it off I think I'll feel mighty proud of myself.

I have picked out the yarn and have done some swatching. Here are some photos of the yarn and my work area. I'm really wishing I had a dress form these days.

So the yarn I'm using is Brown Sheep's Lanaloft in Bulky and Worsted. Its a soft single ply wool with a lot of stitch definition and loft. The dark grey will be for the yoke and the cream for the lace portion. I think this dress will need some heavy duty foundation garments but I've been angling for a reason to buy the fancy pair of Spanx I've had my eye on. I'm currently in the process of charting stitch pattern that will be what I want because despite having a pretty comprehensive collection of stitch patterns I couldn't find one that was just what I wanted. It gave me a lot of ideas to make what I wanted after I swatched a few that were similar. I think that this dress will need a lot of negative ease for the lozenge shapes to really pop and It will need a good amount of blocking. The yarn I'm using is pretty thick though, so I think it won't take too long to knit once I've planned it. But oh the planning!

Thinking about making this dress leaves me feeling like I'm standing on the edge of a cliff. The yarn was not inexpensive and I'm afraid to fail to accomplish what I want to do. I've had a lot of trouble lately with large projects not coming out the way I wanted or anticipated so I hope this goes well. I'll need to buy a petticoat for this dress too, and I don't know where or why I'd wear it but it wants to exist so badly I can't help but move right along with it.