Prairie Tunic and Focaccia Bread

The Pattern: Prairie Tunic by Veronik Avery
Size: 33
The Yarn: 2 1/2 skeins of Valley Yarns Sheffield in Mirage (545yd/498m)
Needle size: US6/4.0mm

Started: 4/14
Finished: 5/22

I've been wanting to make this for 3 years now. Not sure what was stopping me. It is a great little top.

I am a bit unsure of what to wear under it. I've been experiementing with a couple tanks - one regular tank and one racerback.

The instructions tell you to knit this in two pieces, but I'm terrible at seaming. So I wanted to do this in one shot. So I cast on for both the front and back and joined to knit in the round. About 5 rows in I realized that there are supposed to be slits up the side - will I never learn to read a pattern before I start? So I frogged it tand started over.

This time I cast on the back piece and the front piece using two different balls of yarn, then knit two at a time (like with socks or sleeves or other things that come in pairs). Once they were 4" long I joined to knit in the round (the pattern calls for 6 inch slits, but that seemed really long to me). When joining make sure that you are on a RS row and that your work isn't twisted. I continued like this until I got to the the triangle shaping.

Then I knit the left triangle about 50 times. I had two problems.

One: When you get to the triangle decreases you also need to adjust where you start and end the lace panels. BUT the pattern doesn't say by how much. By looking at pics of finished Prairie Tunics on Ravelry I decided to eliminate one decrease and yarn over from the beginning and end of each panel on each third row.

Two: There was errata that I didn't know about. Note to self - always check for errata. The errata isn't much different than what's in the pattern already, it simply eliminates one of the decreases on the inner side of the triangle. Once I discovered the errata it went smoothly.

The twisted cord took me a while to get right. I kept dropping the ends when I was twisting. I finally tied loops in the ends and hooked them around my index fingers. Then I just rotated my wrist to get the cord to twist. I also stood to the side of the door knob that I had the other end looped around, rather than directly facing it. When I was facing it the end kept slipping over the knob.

I have one glaring mistake. I messed up one of the lace repeats. Whoops! It's really obvious to me, but hopefully I'm the only one who notices.

The yarn was good. It is a cotton/silk mix, so there is a little bit of shine. No problems with splitting. I usually avoid plant based fibers, because I like the strechiness of animbal based fiber. But a cotton mix is good for light summer clothes like this. I used about 2 1/2 skeins, there was 22 grams of the 3rd skein left over.

I also made this really yummy focaccia bread. It is from the Bread Baker's Apprentice. It takes about 3 days to make, but it is so worth it.

It is great plain or dipped in marinara sauce.