Wedding bolero

After a long hiatus thanks to a nonsense business of getting married, it is perhaps somewhat fitting that my first post back is wedding-related.

Thanks to a defective gene which causes moments of insanity and an intense love for anything handmade, the then husband-to-be and I decided that it would be a great idea to pretty much create everything for the wedding with our bare hands.

Long story short, it was incredibly fun, we enjoyed every moment of it, but needless to say, it was rather time-consuming and stress-inducing at times. However, if we had to do it all over again, we wouldn't change a thing. And perhaps you will read more about the various wedding creations in posts to come. But I'm not promising anything. I love creating but am terrible at keeping records.

But this is a post about my latest completed knitting project and I will learn to focus. With a wedding planned in spring on the beach, I had an inkling that I would need something to keep me warm after the sun had set and from the cool sea breeze.

I will admit that I actually considered purchasing a ready-made bolero initially (I was making everything else including yes, my wedding dress, and had a dissertation to contend with, so time management dictated that a bolero that I would probably only wear for a short time in the evening be relegated less important in the "to make" list) but after a few days of inability to find anything I liked, I decided the best way to get what I want is to make it myself.

So I found something that closely resembled what I wanted with an incredibly easy pattern and modified it to become the bolero of my dreams. (For those interested, I essentially added a frill edging using this pattern.)
 
In the end, with everything else going on, it still took me four months to complete. It was finished on an extremely warm day, less than a month before the big day, which led me to declare, "I don't know why I made this, I don't think I'll need it at all."

Famous last words.

We had rain, hail and crazy strong winds that day. At 11 degrees, it was one of the coldest day in October history. Without my merino-blend bolero, I would most probably have lost an arm from hypothermia. But this knitted bolero, made from yarn given to me by a friend, kept me really warm and toasty that day. I hadn't planned to wear the bolero for the wedding photos, but it was so cold that day, nothing was going to make me give it up.