My First Crochet Dress

 I got some shawl yarn but I don't wear shawls so I was looking to make something different. It's the same yarn I used to make that light weight granny square hexagon cardigan from a previous post.

I didn't want to make another cardigan, I wanted to try something new. I decided I was going to attempt to make a netted dress. I don't have many summer clothes so there's more chance of me actually wearing it.

I want a skater style dress but with long sleeves, I've been looking for one of those for a while and haven't found one I like so even more reason to try this dress. My first problem was deciding on what stitch to use. I don't have a lot of experience in crocheting clothes and only know basic stitches. I am not planning on following a pattern I am just going to wing it and hope for the best.

I had decided to go with the fillet stitch but I wasn't sure on what size I wanted so I made small samples of double crochet with one chain space and treble crochet with 2 chain space. I went with the treble.

So I got in the groove and started the dress, 3 rows in I noticed I was actually stitching quite slow so I switched it up and changed the stitch to something quicker so I went with the diamond mesh stitch. Once the first couple of rows are done there's not much thinking involved. It's quite repetitive so it's easy to get into a rhythm. I started with the top half and it's coming a long, I'm not entirely sure if it is going to work out yet but I am going to keep at it and just hope it comes out ok.

I decided to keep the design really simple, I wasn't going to do any fancy neckline or anything to confuse me. The main body of the top is literally 2 rectangles. The sleeves were done using the same stitch. Once it got to about elbow length I started adding a couple of extra stitches to each row to make it flare out a bit.

The skirt part again was done in the same stitch but I wasn't really counting rows I was just going around increasing a stitch on every 10th stitch to flare out the skirt part. I just kept doing that until I got to the length I wanted and that was the dress done. 

The style of the stitching makes it very stretchy so the sizing didn't have to be perfect. The original fillet stitch I wanted to use would have had a lot less give to it. For my first dress I thought it came out ok, not too bad. I had 6 cakes of the yarn, I had no idea how many it would take and it probably would have only taken 2 so I have plenty left over to make a granny hexagon cardigan like my hippy one with a bit still left over for something else. 

My next dress is going to be different. It's going to be made up of spiderweb granny squares using red 4ply yarn. I don't have a clue how many granny squares it will take so I am going to make a few and build it up slowly. There will be a separate post for that one when it's done which may take a while. 

Thank you for reading,

Happy Crafting!