Prepare To Crochet

The brief for the crochet section of competitions for the women's organisation I belong to, is to crochet a top suitable for evening wear. Right. I managed to buy mercerised cotton when we went to Kimberley a few weeks ago. It was a bit of a mission because there were two shelves with a muddle of sizes and colours and I had to sift through them to find 10 balls in the same size and colour.

The next step was to look for a pattern. I found hundreds of crochet tops on Pinterest. Some of them didn't have patterns or charts, some of them were completely unsuitable, but even so, there was plenty of choice. After a lot of dithering, I printed out a couple of patterns and crocheted samples using a 2 mm hook. It seemed to me that the fabric was a bit too loose and loopy, so yesterday I looked for a smaller hook. I couldn't find 1.5 mm, but I did get a 1 mm hook. I worked another sample of the pattern I'm leaning towards, and I do think it looks better:

So now I have the beaded knitting project and the crochet top 'ready to roll', but a certain reluctance to get on with them! The deadline is many months away, but I don't want to leave things to the last minute and if I want to enter other sections too, I had better just dive in.