One-shoulder tunic

My fresh-off-the-needles tank top makes me feel like I'm wearing a dramatic Grecian costume, as if I were in a Martha Graham dance.*


And I love it! It's knit from a handspun, rosemary-dyed silk yarn from Avril in Japan, with a cottony texture that suggests tussah or muga rather bombyx silk.

The construction is based on the One-Shoulder Tunic in Teva Durham's Loop-d-Loop. Her pattern used ribbon tape on a size 13 needle; I was using a much lighter yarn on size 5 needles, so I had to change the pattern considerably to adjust to my gauge.


In addition, I added a few inches of crochet to the bottom to keep it from curling, and a few rows of crochet to widen the strap and stabilize the top edge (I might even go back and add a few more rows in the future). I could've added waist shaping, but because it already had some negative ease I didn't think it was necessary.

Martha Graham was my high-brow cultural reference for this project. I have a low-brow reference as well. Do you remember the song that never ends? Back when I was a kid, singing that song was a sure-fire way to be annoying. Similarly, it made for an annoying theme as I knitted this top: "This is the knit that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends. I guess I started knitting it not knowing what it was, and I'll continue knitting it forever just because..."


It took me forever to make this, because I was working with a yarn that was an unknown (and stretched a bit) and because the strap fitting was a bit tricky. I had to do the strap and top inch three times, at 2 hours each. I had to do the bottom crochet three times, at 2 hours each. It became a joke at my weekly knitting night that I was still endlessly working on it. But all's well that ends well!

*I love modern dance and took Graham classes for years, so this was the first thing I thought of when I put on this tunic.