The knitted boleros worn to church by the little Spanish Infantas on Easter Sunday were front-page news all over Spain, so they were bound to catch my knitter's eye.

Picture © letiziaortiz1972, flickr.

The pattern looks really easy to make; some of the pictures showed so much detail that one could even count the number of stitches on each piece.

Body and sleeves are knitted in garter stitch and so is the neckline. One row of crochet crab stitch (shrimp stitch)  finishes off the neckline and sleeves edges.

The only really striking feature of the boleros, and the one that took me a little longer to figure out how it was done, are the ruffles in lower edge of the body.

Obviously, the easiest way to create a ruffled effect is knitting several stitches together, but there are other, possibly more elegant, methods to make a ruffled edge with thicker yarns. One of them are are the bell ruffles, which make good use of a knit-purl combination to create a very regular pattern.

[bell ruffles pattern in Spanish, with chart]