Once I start, I start. There is no stopping me. The original idea was actually something completely different: yarn bought, project started, then “no, this still is not right”, another idea, another yarn, another start and more unravelling. I did have one very definite idea, though, and had bought yarn for it. 
My first yarn choice was the yarn I actually used for the summer cardigan and hat. It was good for knitting, but crocheted it became hard and rough. So I went yarn hunting again, this time not to Karnaluks but to Abakhan . I chose a yarn, looked for fabric for the lining and then ran out of brain, so I asked a sales assistant. I asked whether the yarn would work for a dress. Her first question was whether I was capable of making a dress. Well yes, I have made them before. She had a look and said it would be fine. I neglected to mention that I intended to crochet it rather than knit it.
Together we found lining fabric too and I was extremely happy that I had everything I needed. Home, start making it, and then it seemed to me that the yarn was wrong. The crochet came out stiff. It would have been suitable for knitting.
And once again I ended up at the computer, searching for what on earth to make instead, and arrived back at the Drops website. One dress caught my eye and this time I decided to buy Drops yarn as well. I missed the colour slightly, but I had wanted purple anyway.
Said and done. To my surprise I received the yarn that same evening. I had to drive to Mustamäe to collect it, but with Omniva I would probably have had to wait several days, and I simply do not have the patience for that. The yarn seller is excellent, Must ja Roosa OÜ. It was such a positive experience that I wondered why I had never bought from them before. The pattern says a dress for a five-to-six-year-old takes 350 g of yarn and the headband 50 g, so I bought 400 g. And started knitting 🙂 I used 3 mm needles simply because my things always come out larger than they are supposed to. And I do not knit loosely, quite the opposite. Except for purl stitch. Laugh or cry, my purl is always looser than my knit. You can see the stripes perfectly.
So I cast on the prescribed number of stitches, 224, and damn it, it makes me swear, but it was far too big. And by the time I realised, I had knitted almost the entire skirt section. What happened? I unravelled the whole thing. I tried knitting extremely tightly, so tightly it was difficult to move the yarn along the needle, but it was still much too big. I started again using the stitch count for age three to four, but the centimetre measurements for age five to six. I have to say, it worked.
I knitted the sleeve with 2.5 mm needles because I simply did not have 3 mm double-pointed needles. I knitted more loosely and got the right measurements. I made the headband on double-pointed needles too.
Altogether I used 300 g of yarn. As there was yarn left over, I thought I would make a hat. Not a summer cap but a proper hat. I am still working on that. And another thought: I want to add a small flower to the dress because I do not have any beads and I do not know how to make those myself. Not yet, anyway. Who knows….
The hat is finished too, and so are the flowers. I made piles of flowers and leaves, so if I need any somewhere else I have them ready. I ran wire around the brim, crocheted over it in double crochet and worked the second row in crab stitch, crocheting from left to right. A little awkward, especially as the wire makes the edge stiff. I added the band so the hat would not stretch. It is not starched rock-hard, it is still soft. I did not manage to make it quite as I had imagined. It happens….
And the whole lot looks like this.
Actually I have finished a fairly major project. And I realised that if something stalls, getting it finished becomes a major undertaking. Here too the flowers sat waiting, the hat finishing sat waiting, and I simply could not make myself finish it. I had no hat block, no suitable bowls, the starch did not behave the way I wanted, and somehow all that took away the… desire is not quite the word. I simply could not make myself do it. Perhaps because there was no hurry, more than a month left until the birthday… unless I have got the date wrong again. Last year I nearly went to a birthday party a month early…. 🙂
I had already started thinking about making something else. And I did. Every now and then I checked whether the little flowers on the windowsill had dried, but they had not, so I had another excuse to put the job off.
This morning I finally pulled myself together and finished it. Now I can pat myself on the back.
But that other dress… I have not given up on it. I will make it. I have some very fine single-ply yarn, Haapsalu shawl yarn. I bought it a year or more ago to make a Haapsalu shawl, but I still have not managed to get hold of the Haapsalu shawl book , so I have not started that either.