About four years ago I made a Ripple Bralette by Jessie Maed Designs, who might just be my favorite designer. Okay, one of them. One can never discount Joji Locatelli, and I like them for similar reasons: they design relatively simple sweaters with clever construction, that are thoroughly wearable garments. None of that stuff your great grandmother made with extra bobbles and chevrons and 576 colors.

The initial bralette was a single skein of green yarn, and it made a nice layering piece for the dead of frozen winter in Iowa, but it also got me thinking: wouldn’t this make a great tank top, if I just made it long?

So I grabbed two hanks of Ella Rae lace merino (which is, ironically, actually a light fingering weight yarn) both in the same lovely blue-green colorway—the brand unfortunately doesn’t give them fun names, but numbers, and I don’t remember this boring number. I wound them both and stuck them in a project bag in my car. At the time, because of an issue with the car, I was spending a lot of time sitting in the car doing nothing, so I figured I could instead spend that time working 3×3 ribbing on tiny needles forever.

The problem was that when we moved to North Carolina, I wasn’t doing that anymore, so what had been a project moving slowly but steadily forward became entirely stagnant. When I took it out of my car and brought it in to work on last week, I thought I’d continue to take forever to finish it, but it turns out I didn’t have that much left. I finished it, one of the few patterns I knit precisely to pattern, no major changes to what the designer wrote, other than knitting the body for about 14″ instead of 4″.

Since I started it years ago, that also meant it was made two or three sizes larger than necessary, but in the end, I think that doesn’t show at all, since it’s knit in ribbing, and is still 100% fitted.

I’ll definitely, always, be making more of Jessie’s patterns. Fabulous construction and easy to wear, love it.