Barbie's St. Patick's Day Dress 2012

I wanted to try something new for St. Patrick's Day and found a pattern in Shady Lane's Crochet Hookup Number 4 July/August 1987. While I purchased my copy at a vintage site, for those of you that are interested Shady Lane still has this issue available under the section back issues as of this writing.

The Shady Lane pattern had one challenge I could not overcome and one I ran out of time to complete before this dress had to be packaged for mailing. The pattern has a beautiful overskirt with the pineapple look. However, according to what I have read, not the actual pineapple stitch. While I tried the pattern several times, I could not get the overskirt to work and decided to abandon it until I have time to understand where I am missing the part that creates the pineapple. Do to the time I spent with the skirt, after playing with the collar once and not liking the outcome I decided not to continue and wait for another shot at it.

One of the problems I had was the pattern was written for sports yarn and I had run out so I was trying to adapt the pattern to fingering and baby yarn, which I had stocked up on a while back and never used. This required multiple hook changes to keep the pattern to gauge. I do not think that made the issue with the overskirt, as I did have white sports yarn and still did not get it to work. However, I think some of the other issues would have resolved more quickly with the yarn required by the pattern.

My favorite part of the outfit was the hat. Wrong size yarn or not, I do like this pattern and want to try it for an Easter outfit with sports yarn.

The important thing is Barbie does have a new outfit for St. Patrick's Day and the package can go out this week.