Further Forays in Filet Crochet

The first filet crochet page was made around December 2025, this entry is now in September '26. Since then, I've made this tapestry:

Blue lighter on the left for scale. Also I like to keep my apartment lights on a pink hue, hence the tint on the picture. It's a white tapestry in real life.

My next project has been a dolman-style batwing-arm sweater, no pattern in the style of filet crochet but using the grid mesh technique from it. Dolman sweaters are a style that's usually used for sewing, where the sweater is sewn from one singular piece of cloth instead of two or three pieces sewn together. The middle of the piece is the neck hole, and you fold it in half and sew down the sides.

To do this, I found a template image of a dolman sweater cutout pattern, copied it into my excel file and set the transparency to 50%, then used my arrow keys+shift to highlight the squares that most closely aligned with the pattern, and filled them in with color.

Now before I committed to trying to make this sweater in my size, I wanted to practice the techniques on a smaller scale. For example, my previous filet crochet projects were only squares and rectangles, and this one would have both increases and decreases, both at the start and ends of rows. Additionally, I've never sewn pieces of crochet together with a yarn needle. I also had to make the gap for the neck hole - initially it was supposed to be three rows but I found that to be too challenging at the moment so I made it only one row instead. I made a miniature version of it to practice without wasting too much yarn. It ended up being the perfect size for a bottle of modelo.

She's so adorable. And now when I'm done with my own full-size one, I can twin with her.

I took my measurements and adjusted the shape a little to fit me better, and then tried out different grid sizes on the yarn size I'll use (I've previously only worked with 1 empty stitch per mesh grid but for this project I decided to do 2 stitches). However the yarn itself will be $40 for a 3-pack. I don't anticipate actually using 3 balls of yarn, but it'll definitely take more than one and the 3-pack promises that they're from the same dye lot. Right now that's a little out of my budget so it'll have to wait, at least until disbursement happens. Can't believe we're a month into the semester and the financial aid office still hasn't processed a lot of people's loans. I might have to put my tuition on my credit card if it doesn't process in the next week. I'm so fortunate that I was able to work down my debt to a point that I have that ability though; imagine if my cards were maxed out and I was SOL.

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