Irish Crochet Dress: The Annoying Bit

Hello my Steemit #needleworkmonday friends!

So my Irish crochet dress is finished...

well...

kind of...

I'm at that stage where I've completed the crochet part - sleeves and all...

...but I can't really call the dress finished...

hence the title - 'the annoying bit'.

So yes, I've done the sleeves although it was a somewhat uncomfortable experience in my caravan (campervan)...

My biggest worry with them was 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 didn'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', lying around the caravan...

Most of the time when I wasn't working on it, it 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 and I think I've achieved what I wanted.

And as I was completing the second sleeve, I rushed to take this picture of the 'final'(or so I thought) moment... :

Only to realise that when I finished the dress, it wasn't really finished - there was another mountain to climb:

The lace at the bottom of the dress and sleeves had to be evened out and completed with a simple single crochet line and a little picot here and there.

That finishing single crochet line was, thankfully, very easy and quick.

But the 'evening out of the lace' bit was quite tricky.

While the bottom of the dress doesn't have to be as even as in sewing, it still has to look somewhat even, which I'm still not sure about. It's just that on a flat table the bottom looks even, but when you wear the dress, because there are different elements on different sides, there seems to be an illusion of one side being slightly shorter... I'm still thinking whether or not I should do something about it.

Another very time-consuming bit is the weaving in and hiding of yarn ends - there are hundreds of them!

And although I've been working on them for the last number of days now, I'm still nowhere near to being finished...

The dress has many overlapping elements like this rose and leaf.

As I was crocheting the lace, I didn't realise I had to crochet some lace to join the overlapping sides of the elements to avoid holes like this:

I actually thought I had finished fixing the overlapping elements, but as I was taking photos for this post, I discovered a few more that have to be corrected...

When the sleeves were finished and I tried on the dress, I realised that the neckline will have to be adjusted.

All of a sudden, because of the weight of the sleeves, the neckline became too wide which meant I had to add another layer of leaves-flowers-branches on the shoulders and the back in order to adjust the way the dress sits (sorry, don't have the 'before and after' shots at the moment).

The last elements I'll be working on when all the above are finished, is the little Swarowski beads.

I'll sew them on in the centre of each bigger rose and some leaves around the neck - it'll add some sparkle, especially when the dress is worn in the evening with artificial lighting.

So this is where I am at.

My original plan was to have the dress finished-completed-done-and-dusted on the 31st March...

...but here I am, still at it :-D

Get a hobby, enjoy your life!

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