Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Whoa, I lost about a week there.

This is a photo of the completed baby girl outfit. I had almost all of it done within I'd say 48 hours of finding out I was pregnant, but then the first wave of morning sickness knocked me on my rear and I spent a week dozing on my cousin's couch. (Bless you, Maggie.) I finally felt well enough today to do the tiny bit of work it took to finish the hat.

I don't really have a pattern for the dress. As you can tell from looking at it, I basically crocheted a skirt onto the bottom of a wrap-front shirt.

How I did it: I made a chainless single crochet band a bit longer than I thought I'd need, tacked down the starting end of it, then carefully sewed it to the bottom of the shirt (finding out along the way that you really need to snap this kind of shirt closed first), then unraveled the extra. Second round was single crochet again, then next round got into my lace pattern. I believe this is called the fantail stitch. I was doing it (or a modified version thereof) from memory rather than my stitch pattern book. The first round of it was the fantail (9 alternate double crochets in one stitch), skip 2, single crochet, skip 2 around. This wasn't even, but it made a nicely full skirt in the end. After that initial round I went into the normal lace pattern. It's a 2-round repeat, basically like so: rnd 2 of the pattern is a single crochet in the middle (5th) stitch of the fantail, then chain 4, double crochet in the single crochet, chain 4 around. Then the next fantail round is to work the fantail in the single crochet, skip the chains, & single crochet in the double crochet.

If memory serves, the original fantail stitch in my copy of 300 Crochet Stitches is actually something like 13 trebles instead of 9 alternate double crochets. I've never found it to be really workable in its original form, since trebles take me so blasted long to do, so I was happy to come up with this variation.

I'm thinking of flattening it out to make a blanket, but I'm generally not too fond of openwork blankets. We shall see.

The booties...I had wanted to use Pam Gillette's Mary Jane Slippers pattern, but she doesn't have a baby size. So I looked at the picture & figured out how I could make something that looked similar, and that's what I've done.

They're really cute; unfortunately I have no idea if they'll actually fit. (Oh, & in spite of this picture, the "strap" isn't really crooked.) They're also a whopping 11 rounds/rows, and so work up in about 10 minutes. Here's to hoping I got the proportions reasonably correct.

The hat was quite simple as well. I used the base of my hat pattern for the Beginner Baby Set, only from top down this time, and made it just short of 5" long before finishing with a couple of single crochet rounds to help it stay on (it was pretty loose with just the half double crochets).

I'll post the patterns for the hat & booties here shortly; I really don't have one for the dress (which is why I went into such detail for it & not the others).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cute set! I hope the morning sickness eases soon... sending lots of ginger tea and good wishes your way!!

Anonymous said...

Wow that's adorable! You're very talented!

Thanks for stopping by "Bitter Women". Hope we see you again soon!