The Goodies Dress is a very simple, swingy top-down dress designed by a busy mum to grow with a little girl from dress to tunic to blouse.

This project satisfied my need to knit something in a gradient dyed yarn RIGHT NOW! I used an old, unloved handknitted sweater in Harmony and dip-dyed it to achieve the gradient effect. If you don’t have an old handknitted sweater around to repurpose for this project you could follow any of the suggestions for dyeing a gradient that can be found on the interwebs.

This pattern would look equally lovely in a plain yarn, and is simple enough not to compete with any other type of hand-dyed or self-striping yarn.

There is only one size, but thanks to the top-down construction and very loose fit it would be very easy to make it longer for a taller child, or to start with fewer stitches for a smaller child. The pattern contains some suggestions for how to do this.

And the name? Mr Six took one look at the finished object and said ‘I love it because you have all the colours of the goodies’ light sabres!’