Hello! Hope you are all doing great 🙂 Today I wanted to start a series of posts about this new class I am taking on Craftsy. If you haven’t heard of Craftsy before go to my Craftsy Fair Isle Class Review for more information. After taking that class I was completely hooked with online classes so I decided to take advantage of another one of their sales and buy a new one: Custom Fit Tunisan Crochet by Dora Ohrenstein.

The whole idea of this class is to teach you how to adapt patterns to your size, especially something like a sweater. It includes the pattern for the vest on the picture above and the instructor takes you through the process of making sure that the final piece fits you just like you wanted, which could of course mean giving more ease to the pattern in certain areas and less in others.

This is such a great topic for a class, I can’t believe I haven’t seen more of these before. Who hasn’t looked at a pattern for a garment and realised that your size isn’t in the pattern? I am a petite size, it is quite difficult to find clothes let alone patterns that fit my measures so I am very excited about this class and have decided to take you, my lovely readers, through my learning process. At the end of it we will see if it worked for me or not. I have to say, if it does work, I will be forever grateful.

Now, this class is for a tunisian pattern, but don’t fear! First, the instructor does dedicate a few lessons to the basic stitches, increasing, decreasing, and everything you need for the pattern. Second, from what I have seen so far, the process she teaches to adapt a pattern can be applied to regular crochet as well, especially patterns that work with simple stitches such as dc, hdc and tr, where increasing and decreasing more or less than what the pattern calls for is easy and won’t change the look of the final piece. It might be a bit trickier for patterns that use a stitch-repeat of a certain number of stitches, but it could still work in theory.

So in this first post I would like to share with you the materials I have purchased for my vest. I will start with the yarn, the pattern calls for a worsted weight and the only one I know that I can find in the UK is the Cascade 220 Superwash. This is such a squishy yarn, I love it… I decided to get two colours and add stripes to the vest in a berry and light grey colour.

I also decided to treat myself to some new tunisian crochet hooks. For this project you should be able use the long 30cm hooks with a stopper, but the instructor showed a few options in the lessons and I fell in love with these Knit Pro Interchangeable Tunisian Hooks.

There are a few of reasons why I decided to invest on them, since they are not cheap. First, they are beautiful wooden coloured hooks! I believe Knit Pro sells a cheaper option for interchangeable tunisian hooks but I just loved these. Second, I have a shoulder problem and the long hooks always made one of my shoulders ache since it can become quite heavy to handle. These hooks are light and short so when you are using them only a few stitches will be on your hook and the cord will hold the rest. Finally, there are many different lengths for cords, up to 2 meters, so I am no longer limited by the amount of stitches I can fit in without the risk of starting to loose them.

So now that I have all my materials ready I will continue with the class and keep you updated on my progress so that you can see how the vest is turning out. Hopefully it will fit perfectly once I’m finished, fingers crossed!

x

Sol