With some fiddling, I was able to make this into a sleeveless dress. I’m not going to pretend that it came out exactly as intended, but nevertheless I had a great deal of luck and everything went smoothly with no ripping back at any time. The pattern is written out very clearly, but I had to make a big drawing and write out all of the stitch counts for a few rows to figure out how it was working. Once I figured out the mitered construction, it was fairly easy to extend it in order to make a full dress. There are some major quirks with the finished project (all having to do with me and not the pattern), but I’m very happy with it now that it’s a new color!

I had to neaten all the edges at the top with crab stitch, since one armhole was knit with the stitches facing up, and the other was knit with the stitches facing sideways. One armhole also came out larger than the other, so I had to crochet a little to make it less obvious- an inelegant solution, but it works, more or less.

From looking at the pictures of other people’s FOs, it seems that the placement of the swirl in my dress is slightly higher. While this was totally unintentional on my part, I think that it ultimately helped with the shaping of the dress. The bottom of the swirl falls at my waist, and the lower portion of the mitered construction flares out, resulting in a finished product with (unintentional, but thank goodness) waist shaping.

Also, I have a curse when it comes to buying yarn in colors I can’t stand. For some reason, I always find yarns that look fine in the skein but awful knit into a fabric. The original pale salmon color was too sickly-fleshy to me (the bottom pic is the original!). I’ve dyed my dress brown using 2 packages of Dylon in Dark Brown (the dress is exactly 1 lb). The nylon only partially absorbed the color and looks like a lovely thread of copper running through. It even made some of the quirks of the dress seem less obvious :-).