23-05-2020

Interestingly, when I went back and worked a sample flat piece to find out what tension I was actually getting using this wool and hook, it came out at the 9st/in I originally concluded was far too tight to achieve and made too small a garment! I suspect my gauge in dc is tighter than my gauge in trebles.

It’s impossible to measure the tension of the finished yoke, as it’s not at all flat, but the skirt comes out at about 3 shells per 2 inches.

19-05-2020

Worked 17 rows for a full-length dress, and used 4ch picots instead of 2ch in order to produce visible points. For the buttonholes I worked back down the border of the yoke with slip stitch and made 8-chain loops, instead of skipping stitches while making the border as suggested.

I couldn’t find any red buttons of a suitable size, so made a couple of crochet ball buttons by working 12tr into a ‘magic loop’ and then closing the other end by drawing the end of the wool through the tops of the stitches with a needle. I poked the ends back inside to serve as stuffing.

The buttons are a little on the large side, but they’ll do. Apparently they’re actually supposed to be a back fastening - I’d assumed the two short sides of the dress were the fronts!

16-05-2020

Divide as follows:

Skip eight shells to form each sleeve, leaving 20 out of 36 shells to form body. Work half-shell at edge, 5 shells for first front, ch3, skip 8 shells, work 10 shells for back, ch3, skip 8 shells, work remaining 5 shells for second front, work half-shell at edge. This makes a slightly smaller sleeve opening, but as the armhole is still very generous it shouldn’t be an issue.

This results in 22 shells plus the two half-shells for the main body section, since an extra shell is added under each arm.

15-05-2020

The pattern still doesn’t add up. After a great deal of puzzled counting and re-working I eventually realised that working shells into every alternate stitch of 75 stitches does not and cannot produce 35 shells! I managed to squeeze it down to 36 shells by working the half-shells into the first and last stitches on the prevous round, rather than the turning chain as directed; this takes up four tr at either end, with 35 shells worked alternately into the intervening 70 stitches plus another one into the final, 71st stitch.

Now I need to work out how to even out the armhole/back division….

13-04-2020

Trying again with same size hook but fine red wool instead of crochet cotton, in the hopes of getting it slightly larger.

In order to make the pattern work, I started off with 43 dc instead of 42 in the first row, then did ten increases over groups of 4 stitches to reach 53 trebles in the next row.

Row 2: 2tr, (2tr in same stitch, 3tr) x 10, 1tr =53 st

06-04-2020

Problems with this pattern:

• There’s no way I can get a gauge of nine trebles to the inch. Using the 1.5mm crochet hook specified and the finest thread I have, I can manage eight trebles to the inch. And frankly, even that is too tight a gauge - when I tried it, the top came out at a width of only about 3.5” between the armholes, e.g. to fit a seven-inch chest.
• As someone pointed out in the comments to the original blog entry, there appears to be an error in the number of stitches in the first row and/or the increases, since they mathematically can’t produce the number of stitches in the second row. I winged it on my test piece and managed to end up with an eventual 35 shells in row 5, which is all that is actually required to complete the rest of the design from that point on, but it would be nice to work out how it was actually intended to be made.
• The armholes are not central in the finished piece, since there are only seven shells across the front but five shells in each half of the back, which makes the back two shells wider even if you allow one for overlap (and the pattern tells you to add button loops, so not much overlap implied - or shown in photo). Which makes the result even narrower across the body.
• My picot loops didn’t work as shown in the photos, either; they’re basically just a stiff point around the outside of the existing edge.

I now suspect that it’s not surprising that the only two completed projects out of all the ones added for this pattern are those from Ravellers who used the pattern as a basis for construction but altered the size! :-(
I note that HannaAgnethe split her shells evenly with eight across the front and four on each half of the back - and so far as I can tell from the photos, the original project doesn’t actually have offset armholes.

Looks as if it’s going to be a question of reconstructing the project backwards to establish what the designer actually did, as opposed to her interpretation of the notes she made while doing it…