Before Christmas I started working on a set of projects from paterns from the Nutrcakcer Crochet kit I got as a gift some time ago. I wanted to close out the holiday season by doing one last project from the book, the Russian Dancer. (It took me a little longer than I intended, though, since it's nearly mid-January now).
I had some other projects I needed to work on for the holidays, so it had been a few weeks since I had worked on any crochet projects, and it felt good to get back into it when I started on the arms and legs.
Joining the legs together into the torso went pretty smoothly for me this time, due to a combination of practice and the fact that the pattern calls for doing it with a different color than the top of the legs so it's easier to see what's going on in that first round.
I thought things were going pretty smoothly as I continued up past the shoulders and into the head. I think I did make one minor mistake with the color change at the collar/neck transition, but I don't think it's too noticeable.
The biggest problem I had was when it was time to go back and extend the red skirt from her waist. While you're doing the torso, the pattern has you do a loop of BLO stitches around the waist so that there's a round of exposed front loops to connect the skirt to, but I discovered when I tried to get started that at some point I had reversed the front and back so I had the round-transitions happening on the front of the doll instead of the back, and also that I had messed up one of the BLO stitches and just had a tiny strand to hook into for the second stitch of the round I was trying to attach instead of the full front loop of the white stitch. I kept having a lot of trouble getting the second stitch to work right, and when I would try to back up to undo the problem I would keep going too far and pulling the first stitch out, so I would have to start the whole thing all over again. I was getting really angry and frustrated, but by coincidence I had been focused that week on trying to practice a particular technique for regulating emotions when they get out-of-proportion to the situation and that turned out to be a good situation to use it. The technique calls for doing the opposite of what your emotion is urging you to do, so since I was feeling the urge to yell at the yarn (“Why won't you just work!?!?!”) I did the opposite and talked nicely to it, which felt pretty silly as I was doing it, but then I realized it was no more or less silly than yelling, which I had been doing, and a lot of the anger subsided and eventually I got past that tricky second stitch. Once I got the first few rounds and had something to easily hold onto, doing the rest of the rounds was nice and relaxing again.
Working on the hair was pretty straightforward until I got to the long strands at the back, which are done with chains that are then slip-stiched into. I'm much more used to just working in rounds, and don't do too many slip-stitches, so I found slip-stitching into a chain to be pretty tricky.
There's also a headdress that is added to the hair that had me a bit confused at first, since it used some other techniques I wasn't familiar with, but eventually it came together.
The strands in the back are supposed to be braided together, which I think is a cool idea for the pattern in theory, but in practice I think mine were a little too thick and a little too short to get a full braid effect – I think it would have been better if I had been able to get one more crossover happening.
On balance I think it came out well. Some of the little issues nag at me, like the front-to-back thing, and to way some of the white shows through beneath the belt, but they're probably not a big deal in the long term. Ideally I would have finished closer to Christmas (or even Orthodox Christmas, since she's supposed to be a dancer from Russia), but part of the reason I'm working on crochet is for the fun and the positive sense of accomplishment as I see the work I'm doing directly translate into tangible progress, so worrying about the timing of when it finishes probably doesn't make much sense if I'm achieving those other things (which I am).
I'm guessing I won't do any more of these Nutcracker-based projects for a little while, since it's so heavily Christmas-themed and we're now into the new year, but I've enjoyed the ones I have done.
