House Gown: Alora No. 3300 Evening Gown

Date cast on: 12/25/2017
Yarn: Knit Picks Curio, black, 5 balls, $11.95
Needles: Addi Click, received as a gift in 2010, $0
Other materials: Beads, $2.50
Pattern: Alora No. 3300 Evening Gown, published Minerva Style Book No. 33, 1930, free
Ravelry link here
Follow my progress on Instagram
Total cost of materials: $14.45

What’s a house gown? A house gown is a gown you wear in your house for no particular reason. Come on, don’t ask silly questions. The house gown is beautiful, it’s made of a lovely fabric. Maybe it’s a slinky velvet number that you just can’t pull off without a complicated bra. Don’t worry though, you don’t have to wear a bra with your house gown. Who is gonna see you? Only the people who routinely see you braless anyway. Maybe it’s a lace weight vintagey thing with a bajillion holes to catch on things and a train that will get ruined on the sidewalk. If it’s a house gown, that doesn’t matter because you’re probably not going to leave your house in it anyway. Where do you have to go all dressed up fancy like that? You’re tired and just want to sit on the couch watching Law & Order and knitting impractical garments. That’s what the house gown is for. I believe in house gowns and you can too.

This particular pattern is listed for only one size and I am a 21st Century lady who does not fit that size. It’s cool, everyone is beautiful in their house gowns. So I made some rough estimates on sizing and the top wound up, I would say, significantly larger than I had planned. No worries, though. If I’m going to spend several months knitting an impractical gown for no particular occasion or reason, I will want this to be a gown I can swan around my house in for years to come. The challenge there is that my body is forever and ever changing shape. Sometimes I put on weight, sometimes I lose it. Sometimes I go ham at the gym and wind up with the ass of a warrior goddess and thighs that could crush a watermelon. Sometimes, I just kind of stick to yoga and overeating. All bodies are beautiful and I am apparently going to cycle through a lot of shapes before I leave this mortal coil. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

So the answer is to knit a gown that is larger than what I need currently but not so large that it no longer functions. No matter what, this number is backless. Which makes fit tricky in the first place. This pattern was written with the original intent that the wearer will use a belt to disguise the seam between the bodice and the skirt, but that’s not how I envision it because I rarely accessorize my house gown. My plan, rather than to disguise the seam, is to integrate it using a belt made of I-cord and a drawstring made of a smaller I-cord. The way I see it, if I knit a gown that is entirely too big, I’ll just feel disappointed in myself for not knowing how to gauge anything properly (which is a common problem for me.) If I knit something much too large and try it on in a few years and learn it does fit, that means I have grown into my gown and probably should get back to the gym so my dress won’t fit again. The drawstring solves all of this. If I can cinch it around my natural waist the original intent of the pattern should be maintained and I can wear my house gown at a variety of body shapes and sizes. Depending on how everything shakes out, a smattering of gold beads should take this from effectively a giant negligee to something slightly more thoughtful than that.

Rough approximation of the process as follows:

1. Knit the front section to use as a gauge and practice the pattern. Finished it. Disliked my work. Blocked it.
2. Knit back, much larger than anticipated. I can work with it.
3. Cast on front panel, knit about 6 increases. Counted my stitches and somehow had 30 more than I needed. Frogged and blocked the yarn for reuse.
4. Decided maybe I should start with measurements of myself and really work out the math on this one.
5. Decided to do the skirt in the round rather than panels. Think this will yield a slightly less structured product, but ultimately who cares, this is a house gown. This will eliminate all purls so keeping track of rows will become more important. It will be guaranteed that the front and two back panels match, however.
6. I found if you add the increases on either side of the S1K2TOG PSSO you can add the stitches more invisibly.
7. After about a solid month of knitting the skirt, I think I’m about 40% complete with it. Before I cast on in the round, I basically rewrote the pattern completely, which was for the best. I’m confident that it will fit me adjustably in the future, and it’s even a little less risque than I had expected (we’ll see about that when it’s all finished though.) Eliminating all the purl rows significantly sped up knitting this skirt. I’m effectively knitting three panels at once, without seams, instead of knitting three separate panels and seaming them together later. I worry this may change the weight or shape of the fabric, but I’m willing to risk it if it means I actually complete this garment.
8. I may wind up knitting the bodice a third time, but talk to me after I’m done with the train. Yes, there’s a train.
9. I really like knitting with this yarn. I’ve always been impressed by the quality of the products I buy from Knit Picks. I’ve found Wool of the Andes to be a little too itchy for day-to-day sweater wear, but anything with alpaca they want to sell me I am likely to buy. Curio is what they call a crochet thread, and I can see how they got there. It doesn’t catch, it doesn’t split. I could see this being very useful for a crochet project if that were a thing I knew how to do.
10. I think if I estimated the amount of time I will ultimately wind up spending on this project and multiplied that by the amount of money I would charge as an hourly rate, this is easily going to be a multi-thousand dollar gown made out of almost $15 in materials.