Need some warm weather stitching inspiration? This Crochet Mesh Blouse is for you

A crochet top that you can wear in the summer? That’s exactly what I created with this Crochet Mesh Blouse.

What do you do when you’re a knitter and crocheter and you live in Texas? You get really excited about knitting during the ‘winter’ and then you play around with all kinds of accessory patterns when the weather gets warmer. I knit and crochet bags, clutches, and create home decor items with icord.

For years my favorite things to knit and crochet were accessories. Hats, scarves, and gloves were items I made over and over for friends, family, and craft shows. That was my happy place. I’ve only made a few pairs of socks, and until last year, had never really ventured into clothing.

Last summer, on a whim, I picked up a pair of circular knitting needles and some lightweight yarn and quickly wrote my own knit summer blouse pattern. It only took a few hours, start to finish, to create the blouse.

And I was so in love with the result that I wanted to create a crochet summer blouse.

I used the same lightweight yarn as I did for the knit blouse. I knew the crochet fabric would be denser, so I wanted a sort of mesh pattern. I ended up alternating several different crochet stitches to create the look on the front of the blouse. To create the v-neck I made a couple shorter rows, and then chained stitches on a subsequent row to return to the original width.

I made two long rectangular panels, one for the front of the blouse and another for the back. On the back I chose one stitch, a v-stitch, and used it across the entire piece.

To assemble my blouse I seamed together the sides, starting at the bottom, and stopping to creating the armholes. I also seamed together the panels at the top to create the shoulders, leaving an opening for my head.

This top was made in the moment, which was actually really fun to do. I didn’t even take notes (which make re-creating it a tad difficult). But it was so freeing to just crochet and then rip it out if I didn’t like the way it looked. I know that means that the photos are more inspiration than pattern. But maybe you’ll try piecing together a couple of rectangles and see what kind of crochet top you can create!

And now that I have a finished crochet top, and have finally shared photos of it, I’m ready to create more clothing pieces. I just started sketching some new designs and I hope to share finished pieces soon.