The skirt is knitted top-down, and the top is knitted bottom-up, then the two are crocheted together. The beads are placed with a crochet hook (as opposed to threading them onto the yarn in advance).

I knitted this dress for Christmas 2023. It took approximately 135 hours of knitting and an additional 15 hours for planning and swatching.

The SKIRT:
The skirt incorporates the diamond and shell elements from the Freya shawl (free pattern on Ravelry). The Freya shawl again is based on Stor Rund Dug. In the original patterns, each repeat of the shell doubles the number of stitches, while no increase is made during the diamond pattern. As I wanted a long skirt, the total number of repeats of diamond+shell would lead to doubling of the stitches way too many times, so I inserted another shell pattern through which no increase is made, to prolong the number of rows between the stitch-count doubling.
The skirt starts out at 128 stitches and ends at 560. At some point it gets convenient to change to a very long circular needle (I used 1.5m).
On top of the last two eyelet rows of the last shell repeat, beads are are placed on the stitches on top of the yarn-over stitches.

The TOP:
The top is knitted bottom-up in an all-over lace pattern, where a bead is added to the center of each openwork element on the bodice (and no beads added on the sleeves). The top is worked with out any seams: Sleeves and bodice are joined at the armpits, and decreases give the look of a sew-in sleeve. The top of the sleeve cap is straight over, and when reaching this point, front and back have to be finished separately. The neckline is shaped by short-rows, where the stitches are not cast off, but put to rest. To finish the neckline, the live stitches are knitted and cast off in one go (starting on the back to the right). Over the shoulder, crochet into each edge stitch, then continue knit/cast-off on the live stitches on the front, end with crochet over the second shoulder’s edge stitches.

The weight of the dress is 255g, of which the beads are 50g.
There are a little less than 2000 beads on the dress. The beads are 4mm with a 1.2mm hole, and they are placed on the stitches with a 0.6mm crochet hook.

The top is designed with a few centimeters negative ease, to get a tight fit. The fit works as anticipated on the sleeves, but even though I did many swatches and measured the gauge after wet blocking, the sheer weight of the skirt stretches the body of the top beyond imagination. I planned the joint between top and skirt to be at the waistline, but when the dress is put on, the join sinks down on the hip 10 cm lower!

Credit: This dress is inspired by HeavenlyClassy’s Freya Mohair Dress