Image designed by me with Canva.
Hello beautiful people of Hive! If you do needlework, how’s your current project coming along? Well, I just recently completed mine and it’s such a relief. Who else gets impatient to finish a project when they’ve spent so much time on it? All I can say is that I’m happy I finally completed it, and I’m delighted with the look.
In my last post about crochet hooks, I mentioned that I got selected to join a crochet mentorship programme, and was asked to choose a project to work on. Well, I decided to do a dress. I hadn’t tried it before and with my mentor’s guidance, I knew that I’d learn how to be accurate with measurements.
So I made a sketch of the dress I had in mind and put in my measurements. Then, I picked the colour of yarn, and type of stitch. I chose to use the lemon peel stitch which is a combination of single crochet stitches and double crochet stitches. I wanted a thick dress, so I doubled the strands, making use of two at the same time. And for that, I used a size 4mm hook.
Before I began, I made a swatch.
I was going to start from the bottom and work my way upwards, so I used the swatch to calculate how many rows and stitches I’ll crochet from the bottom to the hips, from the hips to the waist, and from the waist to the bust.
I worked on the front panel first. When I got to the hips, I decreased till I reached the waist. From the waist, I increased to get to the bust. Next, I worked on the arm holes and after a few more rows of crochet, I finished off with the straps.
For the back panel, I repeated the same process. Now, something happened when I started the back panel. I didn’t get enough yarn for my project. I had just two balls left aside from the one I was already using, which was almost used up. So, I went to the shop to get more. Lo and behold, they had run out of the colour. I couldn’t find in any other shop there in the market. And there was no crochet shop near where I lived — I didn’t know any — so I had to order online. Unfortunately, when the order arrived, I saw that the shade of yarn was darker than the one I was using.😭
I was lucky I still had two balls of the old yarn. I decided to mix both colours. This is what I arrived at.
The next step was to join both panels. I was going with puffed sleeves, so after that, I went back to the straps to crochet them. To achieve the ‘puff’, I crocheted two stitches in one stitch around the shoulder part. Then for the last two rows, I made reductions by crocheting two stitches together from the first stitch to the last stitch. I alternated two single crochets together with two double crochets together. After crocheting both sleeves, my dress was complete!
I spent a long time on this project because I was slow. Some days, I didn’t crochet at all. Some other days, I crocheted only a few rows. I’m just glad I’m finally done because I can’t wait to get started on another project. So after about a month of crocheting and eleven balls of 40g yarn, my dress is finally complete. The satisfaction!
Like I asked my fellow needleworkers at the beginning of the post, how’s your current project coming along? Let me know in the comment section.
Thanks for visiting my blog, guys. Till next time. Ciao!
All images are mine, unless stated otherwise.