Zoey Espiritu (11) carefully added the final crochet stitch to her dress before snipping the red yarn and weaving in the ends. Her fingers throbbed as she stepped back to look at the finished product with pride: a form-fitting floor-length red dress with a crocheted lace overlay on the skirt and mesh details with pink flowers around the torso, ready to be worn at Prom. She was finally finished.
Espiritu has been crocheting for about three years, and she wanted to challenge herself by crocheting her own prom dress. To find the pattern, she browsed social media until she found the perfect design.
“For my first prom, I wanted to make something myself for the special occasion,” she said. “I was looking on Pinterest and Instagram for so long because I wanted to find a dress that I really liked, and there was this one pattern and I liked the lacy skirt and the flowers. I wanted a dress that looked crochet, but it also didn’t look cheap or handmade in a bad sense. I wanted something that had a lot of fine details.”
Espiritu has been crocheting for about three years, making pieces like the Taylor Swift cardigan and other sweaters, but she said that this was her biggest crochet project yet. Although she wasn’t worried about her ability to crochet the dress, she wanted to make sure that she could finish on time.
“I wasn’t really nervous about actually creating the dress, but rather that I would lose motivation and regret not making it earlier,” Espiritu said. “That’s why I started super early in the summer, and having so much time helped relieve the pressure and allowed me to stay motivated to make the dress at my own pace.”
Before she began crocheting, she needed to figure out her measurements, do some math on how to get the proportions right to fit her, and decide how much yarn to buy. She ended up choosing cotton yarn because it felt the most comfortable and was lightweight.
After a month of extensive planning in July, she began the first stitch. Espiritu said that she had to learn a lot of new stitches for the lace layer of the skirt, like the linked double crochet, shell stitch, and the picot stitch.
“I had to learn most of the stitches,” Espiritu said. “Crochet is built on a foundation of stitches, but then they do weird things with them. A lot of the individual steps are the same, like pulling through loops and yarning over, but the things that make these individual stitches different are the amount of times you do a certain step, or when you do it. I would get really frustrated when I didn’t get something right away, but then I got it eventually.”
Despite not knowing many of the stitches, Espiritu said that her experience from years of crocheting helped her learn them faster.
“When I started [crocheting], the first thing I made was really big and chunky, and it took a long time,” she said. “As I’ve crocheted more, it’s been easier to make pieces that go to certain measurements, like for the dress, making sure it fit my body right. I’m able to learn a lot more complicated stitches quicker and have the endurance for the bigger projects.”
For Espiritu, the repetitive motions of crochet are extremely calming.
“I really like the process of crocheting,” Espiritu said. “The movements are very therapeutic because they’re all very similar, so I know what I’m doing. I also just like having something to wear or to hold that I’m really proud of, and that I know I made myself and put a lot of effort into.”
When Espiritu finished crocheting in November, she added elastic to the waist and steamed the skirt to make the hemline sit just below her ankles. After putting on her dress for the first time, Espiritu said she was pleased with the finished product.
“When I finally finished crocheting it, it was so relieving to be able to see the final project in my big mirror and actually on me,” she said. “It took a lot of work to put on because I was worried about ruining it or unraveling it. But afterwards, I just admired the lace details because it doesn’t look like much on the hook, but on me you can really see the details come to life.”
At prom, Espiritu said that she was proud to show off what she made, and received many compliments for her handiwork.
“Everyone, even people I haven’t talked to in so long, were like, ‘Your dress is so pretty, did you make it?’” Espiritu said. “At Balboa Park when we were taking pictures, this random lady was like, ‘I love your dress,’ and just walked away. I don’t know if she knew I made it, but she was so nice and that was really cool.”
Espiritu said that being able to wear something of her own creation after months of hard work was rewarding.
“I was really proud of myself once I was done,” she said. “It was about three months in the making, and actually seeing I could single-handedly take yarn and turn it into a detailed prom dress was mind-blowing.”
