Of pies and dresses

Having finally managed to find a supplier for Australian bush spices and get my hot little hands on quite a few of them, I decided that today was the day I tried them out. I also wanted to improvise a dish, rather than spend ages (which I tend to do) flipping through recipes books and getting distracted by every yummy picture I come across. For lunch, then, I made a vegetarian pot pie, which consisted of a creamy potato mixture, mushrooms, and a tomato relish with a bit of spice and tang. I don't know why the puff pastry (shop bought) didn't puff up fully, but the dish was otherwise quite alright. While the individual elements tasted good, I think they probably didn't go extremely well together, since they have their own characteristic flavour, and the tomato relish was quite robust in flavour. Next time, I'll either omit some of the spices from the relish, or make the potato mixture more plain. Here's some piccies to tickle your tastebuds:

No cheesie toasties for me, coz I'm sick at the moment, and didn't want to exacerbate my cough.

Back to my knitting, I finished knitting the whole back of my Gatsby dress last night :D I only have 3.5 balls or so left for the front half of the dress, and frankly, having started with 10 balls, I'm a bit worried.. The online yarn store, from where I bought the yarn originally, doesn't even stock Rowan yarn anymore (if I am remembering the name of the shop correctly), and even if I can find the yarn from a different shop, the dye lot will be different, so I may potentially end up with a dress of 2 different hues of blue :'(






The bind-off instructions for the neckline was a bit weird.. Normally, patterns just ask to BO stitches at the centre and then decrease along the neck edge thereafter, but this one called for 2 lots of BOs at the neck edge after the main centre BO, which requires yarn to be cut and joined a few times. Of course, in my case, I just left a long end and secured this through a few stitches at the back, before bringing it up to use again for the next row.






The little lace details keep the design an interesting knit, except I'm not sure of the value of having the eyelets under the bust line. The knitted fabric is most certainly opaque enough to be worn on its own, but I'm not sure it would look that good with a spotty row of naked skin showing through... I guess if it looks bad, I could thread a matching ribbon through the eyelets or something.





I actually did knit a gauge swatch this time (haha, I know, surprise!), but....don't you reckon the dress is looking a bit narrow? Even the double-rib waist band, when manually stretched across my waist, reaches its elastic limit when thus manipulated. I hope I still end up with a wearable dress when I finish the whole thing!!