Otis Remont

I actually took this picture a while ago, but I think I was trying to describe it to someone recently... I never actually wore Otis, the sweater I designed for Knitty, after the photo shoot. I think it was entirely because of the ribbon I picked for the ties--you can't see it in any of the pictures on Knitty, but it was really transparent and shiny, and always looked weirdly dressy when I tried to wear the sweater in real life. Plus, the dress I most wanted to wear it with (the one I'm wearing in the Knitty pix) also ties in the back, so when I wore them together there were too many ties.

So I removed the seed stitch hem from the fronts and back of Otis, put the live stitches on a circular needle, overlapped the fronts to make a nice V, and lengthened the sweater to below my waist. The new part is basically a tube, but with some waist shaping. The top is a little bigger than it would have been if I'd made it on purpose, because I sized it to wear over a shirt or dress and now I wear it on its own. But it's essentially ok and now I wear it all the time. I was a little worried that I'd missed a stitch (probably near the edge of one of the pieces) when I picked up my new stitches, and that it would unravel, but so far that hasn't happened.

Remont, by the way, comes from "na remont" which literally means something like in remodel or repair. It's what the signs would say in Russia (I studied there for a semester in college) when something was closed for repairs, so we saw it a lot. And it's still what I hear in my head when I see something that's closed for remodeling, or one of those signs that asks customers to "pardon the dust as we remodel to serve you better." Russian signs did not talk about serving you better; you were lucky they explained why the place was closed at all.

"Na obyed," also by the way, means out to lunch (as in, closed because the workers are na obyed... it's a wonder anything was open). My favorite was the signs we saw on Lenin's tomb in Red Square, explaining that Lenin was na obyed. Obviously, the sign meant the security guards, but the image of Lenin himself going out to lunch (decades after his death) was endlessly amusing at the time.