After a not very successful attempt as starting a stripe of waves on the red dress at the end of previous week, I was in a bit of a slump. Also, both me and my son were pretty sick – him with scarlet fever and me with some mutated version of it.
To pick my crafting mood up, I went for a couple of really quick and easy projects. One evening I made a new scrubbie to wash the dishes om old nylons. I really needed one badly, as the old one was all filthy. It doesn’t look particularly attractive, especially in the photos for some reason. But works really well, you can put it in the washing machine, and it’s recycled!
Then I also did a very simple traditional dishcloth: start with 4 stitches, k2, yo, k till the end every row- until it’s wide enough. Then switch to k1, k2tog, oy, k2 tog, k till end every row – until there’s only 4 stitches left.
All these rows of garter stitch really calmed me down. I really like very simple knitting patterns when I am not feeling well.
In the meanwhile, I decided to block the flower stripes that I had finished for the dress. Towards the end of the week, it occurred to me that I should probably do some swatches for the dress, to help me approach the wave section more rationally – as just trying did not work. So I did one swatch of simple dc’s. And another one, inspired by this pattern. I however, did not do any randomness. After initial row of dc’s (which was actually a a row of foundation dc’s – and the edge looks so much better compared to first swatch, where I started with chains), my next row was a repeat of: 2 dc, 2 hdc, 2 sc, 2 hdc, 2 dc, 2 tr. In the next row I inverted the stitches, and did hdc into each dc, dc into each hdc, tr in each sc, and finally sc in each treble. Here I realized my first mistake about crocheting into the petals – I did invert tr’s and sc’s but for some reason made dc’s in to dc’s and hdc’s into dc’s.
After blocking the swatches, I played with putting them next to my flowers to see how it all works together.
And I could see much more clearly how many stitches I should have for a repeat between two flowers, and how to distribute those stitches to create a fabric that would actually lay flat. I did this last night, and got really inspired, grabbing my hook, and going for it. The aim of the first round was to smooth out the uneven edge. And it did not look bad.
So for the second round, I decided to do dc’s on top of the flowers and tr’s on top of the dips between the flowers, to even it out even more. As I was crocheting this, I also changed my mind about the construction. Initially, I had thought to crochet half of the rows of the waves onto both sides of each flower row, and then join these wide stripes. Now I think to make the fabric smoother, I will crochet all of the section onto the bottom of one stripe of flowers, and then join to the next row of flowers ( if that makes any sense to anyone…). So I proceeded to do 2 rounds of trebles, and one round of dc’s alternating with trebles, to start creating the shape that would fit the next stripe of flowers.
I does look like I might have too many stitches… I will now work on the next section of flowers, and try to join both of these and see if it puckers ( and I need to maybe decrease in the second round of the wave section and increase back in the last one. But I think I am on the right track with this…
My goal is to recreate this dress pictured below. I am using 100% cotton – Cotton Soft Speciale Baby by Lane Mondial (180m/50g). It’s not as shimmery as the yarn in the picture, so the overall effect will be slightly different. I am using US crochet terminology throughout. I am blogging in quite a detail to document for me and for anyone else who is interested the whole process. Click on tag “Red Dress” to see all related posts.
