Irish Crochet Dress: Picture Emerging

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…