Our Dear Girl was rather happy with her birthday. She ate cake, played party games, thanked her guests politely for their lovely gifts and then posed uncooperatively for her mamma’s pics!
One of her gifts this year was a Little House on the Prairie costume. We all feel we know the Ingalls very well as they kept us company on the drive to Adelaide some months ago. Our Dear Girl likes to play Little House on the Prairie too. I usually get to be Pa, looking out for wolves, calling to Jack the dog and asking Laura to build a fire. Our Dear Girl is of course Laura and a dolly often serves as Baby Carrie. Sometimes a friend, who has no idea what is going on, is called on to play Mary and hide from random wolves. It is all very exciting.
The dress already has the yellow paint seal of approval from wearing it to Playgroup!
For the Laura costume, I used Simplicity 3725 and made the bonnet and frock from discounted patchwork fabric and had enough fabric in one of My Man’s old shirts for an apron.
There were some cotton lace scraps in the stash of perfect length.
Another of her gifts was a pair of stripey long socks…I have called them Annie Bonney’s Pirate Socks. They were a special request from Our Dear Girl after we happened upon this illustration in Jane Yolen’s The Ballad of the Pirate Queens, a swashbuckling picture book about Annie Bonney and Mary Read, real life pirates who sailed with Calico Jack in disguise. They were saved from the gallows when it was discovered they were both pregnant to Calico Jack!
I didn’t use a pattern for these, just winged it from the standard gauge and leg measurements. The socks are knitted from the top down, the leg has three sets of double decreases down the centre back and I used the Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato Heel again. I had just enough yarn to finish…the pirate knitting gods were smiling.
The pic does make it look like Our Dear Girl has two very different sized feet but I promise you they are pretty much the same and the socks are exactly the same except for colour variation in the grey Zauberball. I could have taken a better pic, but she wouldn’t let me!
