The whole last week was bitter cold, full of snow, ice and sunshine and I loved it. Being outside wrapped in multiple layers of warm clothes, wandering through the silent landscape. (Not so fun was/is, that our heater stopped working every other night and -14 degrees Celsius without heater is a tad uncomfortable in my opinion).

With this cold weather I would be the right moment to present you my finish thick and long knitted cardigan: it’s weather appropriate, fits into the winter with its muted color and I already have forced my husband to take photos of me while wearing.

But… (you perhaps anticipated this my dear readers 😀 )

But…. I have this new dress which I only bought out of solidarity because I have ordered garments for my mothers birthday (you see my excuses to buy clothes are getting weirder by the day) and I love it. It was one of these lucky buys. Actually, it has a fit I would not have thought I will like on me, but since I bought it, I wear it daily (I must wash it now and I am devastated to be separated from it).

The dress is made of a soft jersey like you would use for a sweatshirt. It is very wide and so comfortable I hardly notice that I am wearing something. But its fit is unusual for me, because it has a lowered waist and so far, I have tried several times to wear or make a dress with this waist-fit and they all looked gruesome on (in my view). But this time I am ok with it (i love it) and what should you do if you love a garment? Right, buy several thousands more in different colors… or try to copy-sew it.

So, here I am on Monday morning sitting on the floor of my study and trying to reverse engineer this dress into a pattern for me to sew millions of times (you see I am very excited).

As you can see on the photos the dress also features a huge white collar with frills and I loooove collars with frills or rounded Peter Pan collars. But as the collar looks daunting to me, I will not improvise it but use a pattern from fibremood. The latest magazine featured the blouse „Honey“ which has exactly this kind of collar. The only thing I am unsure about, if I should try to sew a removable collar (I found a explanation here), so that I can wear it over different dresses or sweaters or if I should make an attached one (I fear the real question is, if I manage to sew the collar with frills at all)?

Today I have measured my dress and cut out the front body pattern from an old newspaper. I will make the backside identically only the neckline curve will differ. I will omit the back opening as I think I will get my head through the neckline without it (I hope….)

The sleeves are more complicated (for me) to reconstruct. I will show you next week how I will work on this problem. If I write next week about my knitted cardigan, you will know that I botched the sleeves or the whole dress is a mess and I am trying to convince you it never existed. :-DDD

Thank you @crosheille for iniciating and @muscara and @marblely for hosting the #needleworkmonday. If you want to see more beautiful projects with yarn, fabric and most of all needles, follow @needleworkmonday on hive blog. Or even better grab your needles and keyboard and join the #needleworkmonday community. You can read more comments on this post on my hive blog.