Reboot: Fish Garter Belt

When one is a graduate student their job is school, well research really. In any case, that job, and planning a wedding (actually two - recently helped some friends plan and execute a wedding in 2 weeks), pretty much meant I wasn't doing much knitting-wise. Up until today I thought that meant I had nothing to blog about. But I've been working on heavily modifying version of Carol Feller's Iced. I'm putting a vine panel (from Knitting on the Edge) down each shoulder about 2/3rds of the way down the arm and giving it a 2x2 rib stitch boarder. 

Drawing of what the Cardi should look like when it's done.
Here's hoping it does.

That got me thinking, some of my most favorited items on Ravelry are of projects where I heavily modified the patterns. Now my question is: what's the copyright laws on sharing these patterns with other people? Seriously, I need to look into it because I would love to be able to share some of my ideas. 

But what I do know is that as long as I'm referencing and citing other people's work it's okay to share directions. So here directions to my most "favorited" project, The Fish Garter Belt.

Fish Garter Finished

This garter belt was made in 2009 for my friend's wedding. She is a fish biologist, and her husband (then to be) couldn't stand fish. I figured I'd try to make fish just a little bit more appetizing to him. 

I started off doing a search on Ravelry of "fish" patterns. There are a ton. But Cookie A.'s Pomatomus really stood out to me. And on top of that it is another great free Knitty pattern. 

The garter belt was made using only Chart B of the Pomatomus socks pattern. Luckily for me, the socks had the scales going parallel to the side of the foot, so I didn't have to modify the chart at all. 

It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure I just did the two repeats, so I started off by casting on 36 stitches onto US 00 needles and just worked until it was long enough to wrap around the bride's thigh. Unfortunately, it's been long enough that I don't know the gauge of the stitches.

I used Misti Alpaca Lace Solids and threaded blue beads prior to knitting to give the bride something new and blue.  I threaded a lot more beads than I ended up needing, so it was a bit of a pain carrying-along all those beads along as I knitted, but it works nicely to just randomly pull down a bead for each scale set. Then I just finished it off by threading through some thin (1/8 of an inch) blue ribbion.

Somethings I would definitely do differently. First off, after casting on, I would have done an eyelet row of something like k2, *yo, k2tog, k1* k2. Purl one WS row, start with the pattern, then repeat the basic eyelet idea after the belt was the length I wanted.  This would have made it easier to lace up the belt. I would also have incorporated more elastic into the belt, perhaps even using elastic lace weight yarn. And lastly, I probably would have used slightly bigger beads with larger holes so that I could use the hooked beading technique instead of the carry-along method. 

Hope this write up helps. Please let me know if you try it and how it works out!