So I was sitting in my caravan during one of my numerous trips across the British countryside.
It was raining outside and I didn’t feel like sightseeing…
In moments like these, I am so thankful to have a hobby, and at the moment I am obsessed with crochet.
Irish crochet, to be more precise.
So I quickly whipped out my yarn and hook and one rainy afternoon later I had a new accessory for my summer outfit – a Chrysanthemum Flower Brooch.
It will look perfect with cotton dresses, shirts or jackets.
And then I discovered I had a red yarn in my crochet bag, which meant I will soon have two Chrysanthemum Flower brooch accessories for my summer outfits.
One more rainy afternoon later, ta-dah!
Do you want to learn how to crochet this Chrysanthemum brooch?
This way I find it much easier to picture how a finished sleeve will look like.
My biggest worry with the sleeves is the area where the chest meets the underarm. I’ve seen quite a number of crochet dresses with a lot of tension in that area, which doesn’t look very nice.
So my solution was to stuff the upper part of my modeling dress to replicate the shape of the body.
I ended up with a weird looking ‘mannequin’ 🙂
Most of the time when I wasn’t working on it, my mannequin spent wrapped up in an old sheet, looking like this:
I had to make sure the lace in the underarm region doesn’t have any tension. Therefore I added extra rows of lace in that area.
As I’m looking at the sleeves, I’m relieved to remember that the two won’t have to be identical. They have to look only somewhat similar.
As I was completing the second sleeve, I rushed to take this picture of the ‘final'(or so I thought) moment…
Far from being the ‘final moment’ of crocheting this Irish lace dress, this was only the beginning of the final stage…
… as if by some sort of quiet magic, on a dark and rainy Saturday evening, I crocheted the last bit of lace, completing the main body of my Irish lace dress…
…which means, almost 2.5 years after I’ve started working on it, I can finally try the dress on FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER and see what it actually looks like on me.
So here it is, the first proper glimpse.
To tell you the truth, I was a bit anxious for a few moments before taking a look at the mirror. After all, it could have been a total disaster…
As you will see, this is just a rough, unfinished ‘first draft’.
After that first time look at the mirror, the good news is, I didn’t see any major flaws which would require me to redo large sections of the dress. Phew…
But of course, there are a number of things that’ll need adjusting.
For example, some flowers and leaves are a bit stretched when on the body and got slightly displaced. So I will have fix that.
I also see that I’ll have to fill in the small spaces between some of the branches, which I originally thought would be nice to keep void. I just think it will look better if I filled those spaces.
As you can see in the pictures, some flowers and leaves are a bit wonky and loose (I didn’t connect them properly). They’ll have to be readjusted and then ironed when the dress is finished.
Also, when crocheting the lace flat on the table, I thought the dress was going to be a bit loose as I was quite generous with adding some extra lines of lace.
But it turns out the lace hugs the body and sits quite close to the skin.
I think this has mainly to do with the dress design I modeled the lace on, which is a classic fitted style. This basically means that putting on even a bit of weight would be a no no 🙂
So what else is there to be done?
1. Sleeves.
The moment the excitement of actually being able to wear the dress passes, I’ll crack on with the sleeves.
My plan is to crochet sleeves that would cover 3/4 of the arm, I find it a very elegant sleeve length.
I’m planning to use darker yarn for the sleeves the way I did for the sides of the dress, so as to achieve a slimming effect.
I absolutely adore that light green yarn colour I used for the middle of the dress and many background elements. The trouble is that if I used it for the sleeves, the arms would look larger, as light colours tend to give the illusion of a larger frame.
Although I’ll see how I go, I might add some light green lace towards the bottom of the sleeve.
Now as I am writing this, I’ve realized I’ll also have to make a decision whether to keep my sleeves detail-heavy or detail-light, where I’d have just a few details running down the sleeve and the rest would be lace.
Let’s see, I’m still not sure.
The original design I bought instructions for was sleeveless, so I have no guidance here, will just have to trust my instincts.
That’s the beauty of Irish Crochet, it’s a fluid process with no strict rules. This makes it easier to correct mistakes or readjust your design as you go along.
2. Sewing in the ends of the threads.
Once I’m happy with my sleeves and how the dress turns out, I’ll have to hide all those pesky ends of yarn – hundreds of them 🙁
I’m leaving them now because I want to know exactly where the end of a thread is if I need to redo a section. So they’ll be hanging around until I’m completely satisfied with the dress.
3. Sparkly beads.
When everything is finished and the dress is ironed, I’ll also add some sparkly beads around the neckline. After all, it’s a dress for special occasions where a bit of sparkle is always welcome 🙂
I’ve already added some beads to the main flower. I like that they are almost invisible in the daytime and will have that eye-teasing effect in the evening.
So that’s where I am and where I’m going 😀 Still some distance to go, but the end is in sight :-DDD
A quick update on my Irish crochet lace dress in progress.
The back is finished! Yay!
As I’ve written before, I still have the sides and sleeves to crochet, but the encouraging thing is that I finally feel I am approaching the finish line!
Although somewhat slowly… 🙂
This is a much happier feeling than the one I had when I finished the front of the dress, it was just so daunting to think how much I still have to do…
…and now I feel a rush of enthusiasm to keep pushing forward!
Many late nights, early mornings and numerous stolen moments later a clearer picture emerging…
…my Irish Crochet dress seems to be actually coming together!
Here’s a little update of that emerging picture:
As I wrote in my previous posts about this dress, the process is really slow and tedious…
To be perfectly honest, I’ve had some very VERY dark moments of despair, when it seemed that no matter how many hours I was working on it, I was stuck in one place unable to move forward…
And yet I was wrong…
…as one quiet evening, I finally unpinned the lace from the work table, turned it around and finally saw a fuller picture.
So here’s where I am at at the moment:
And here’s a full-length image:
Below are a few process images, just to give you a fuller picture:
As mentioned before, after crocheting all separate elements separately, you then lay them out on a flat surface to form a desirable shape and picture.
It is a time-consuming step as you have total freedom in terms of design. I wrote about this step more extensively HERE
As you can see in the picture, I used an old purple dress in order to achieve the right size/shape/length.
Normally, Irish crochet tutorials tell you to do your measurements from scratch and cut out front/back/sleeves of a dress from a separate material and then model the dress on that. But I see no harm in using something that’s readily available and saving some time and energy 🙂
This old dress you see in the pictures is only here for modeling. It won’t be part of the finished dress.
After you are happy with the picture you’ve laid out, you then have to attach the elements to your surface by stitching. You then start crocheting lace to gather all the elements together.
As mentioned in other posts, when crocheting the lace, you are looking at the ‘bad’ side of the dress. This means you can only see the emerging picture, after you finish a section, unpin your work from the surface and turn it around…
…always an exciting and scary moment in equal measures…
Here are a few close-ups, enjoy!
After this epic journey, which isn’t even half done, I needed a little rest.
And now I feel the dress is calling again and I must go… 🙂
