Dress Your Doll - Dress Design No. 1

This is gonna be instructions on how to crochet your favorite doll a dress. This works for any size doll you like. As I said, it's instructions, not a pattern. (Although I will write the pattern of what I did, in case you have a My Scene doll and want the same dress)
At first you want to undress your doll and chose one of these tops (yellow, red or green) and one skirt (yellow, red or green). (I used both yellow).

Yes, I colored them with MS paint. Hush now.

Create a slip stitch and chain as high as you need. (For the yellow top, from the belly-button up to underneath her chest) (For the red top, from the top of her chest to her belly-button) (For the green top, from the top of her chest to the bottom of it) (for a My Scene doll and a yellow top, that's a chain4.)
Next you do a turning chain and you HDC across. We want this bit to be stretchy, so don't crochet too tightly.

Continue crocheting rows of HDC until it just fits around your doll. I'm gonna close it like a corset, but you can use buttons, a zipper, hook and eyes or even velcro. If you're gonna use a closing-method that involves overlapping fabric (velcro), add one more row of HDC.


Done?
You can fasten off. You can also sew in the end from the beginning slipknot.

Next step: If you're gonna close it with a string like a corset, you follow this step:


Get a piece of string and weave it through the foundation-chain and the top of the last stitches in criss-cross.

As you can see, I chose a hot pink to have a strong contrast with the purple.

We want it to look like this:

Insert your hook like on this picture (bottom rim). Take your yarn and create a slipknot.

Insert the slipknot into the stitch on your hook.

Then, slipstitch into the opposite stitch like in the next picture:

Now you're gonna start crocheting around that bottom rim. Two HDC at a time until you reach the end of your round.

 
Now we don't want that ugly seam we get from slip-stitching at the end of each row, so we're gonna work in continuous rounds.
If you want to make the green skirt, you'll continue by doing single stitches from now on until you like the length of your dress.

We'll just go on crocheting, but with a stitch marker.

For the second row I did an HDC increase followed by 5 single stitches.


You can chose another amount of stitches in between increases, but I recommend an uneven number for this row.

When you are nearing the end of your row, you will find that your stitch-count will probably not match with the end of the round.

Don't worry about it.

Just finish your frame and replace the stitch marker. It doesn't really matter for this pattern.

I am doing the yellow skirt, so I'm gonna continue increasing for a little bit longer.
We're not making an entire sphere here, so we're not gonna add one single stitch each row, but several.
For example, I went from 5 single stitches to 7.

See how my stitch marker does zig-zag jumps? This really doesn't matter!

This is the last row of increasing I am doing. If you're making the red skirt, you'll continue increasing. If you're doing the yellow skirt, but for a bigger doll, I suppose you could continue too. Just try out what looks best to you.

My stitch marker kind of played hop-scotch, didn't it?


I am now doing several rows of single stitches until the skirt is long enough for me. (I did 4 rows)

I like it this length, so now I'm gonna fasten off.

To hide the end of the round, I finished off by doing 1SC and a slip stitch in the next stitch before cutting my yarn and sewing it in.

Next we want to create the bust. In order to do so, we're gonna insert another slipknot. This time into the upper rim of that first bit we made. Just like on the picture, we'll take the very first space left of the closing gap.
We're gonna SC until we reach the end of the back. Under the arms we're gonna make HDC and once we reach the front of the dress we do clusters of DC. (I did 6DC in 1st). In between I put 1HDC and then I repeated the whole thing, but backwards.

This is what it looked like in the end.



Now I just needed something to hold it up. I went for a neckholder-thing. I slip-stitched my way from the back of the dress to the tip of the clusters and finished off with chains to tie together in her neck.

 Here is the basic dress.

Now you can embellish it to your liking.

You can add decorative buttons.

Or little flowers.

Or ribbons...

Whatever you like.

A sash, maybe?

Or a bottom rim?

There are no boundaries!

NO EDGE to your fantasy!

Here's how mine ended up. I laced some string into the front of the belly-part to make it look like a corset.




I also laced a chain all through the bottom-most stitches of the skirt to imitate ribbon.




And I added a row of SC interrupted with picot-stitches.