Last week, I caught myself thinking that I don’t have an ugly Christmas top to wear to any Christmas functions.

In the northern hemisphere, people wear the ugly (although I think they’re all fabulous) Christmas jumpers. Here in the Southern Hemisphere, Christmas Day is usually very hot, and there’s no way anyone wears anything heavier than a tank top or a light linen shirt.

However, I wanted to crochet a simple top for the festive season. It might even be a conversation piece.

So I headed off to Spotlight which is a huge yarn and fabric store and pottered about in the aisles for an hour or two just perusing the products and saw this novelty yarn. I bought three balls of each colour and chuckled planning my next project.

I found a pattern in a book I had from some years ago but I’m following it “loosely”. I just wanted the basic stitches but the rest of it all comes from designing it in my head. I started the stripes of double crochets – a relatively easy crochet project and just measured out the size using another top I had as a guide.

I was making it up as I went along – crocheting and frogging (unravelling, rip it, rip it, rip it) as I saw fit.

Once I finished two squares I added more vertical rows on my sides and did a basic neckline and added some edging on the sleeves. I was in two minds to add some feather trim along the neck line as in the heat, it might end up looking sad as I sweat in it. 🤣

I have now finished the top and I LOVE it. It looks fantastic and when I tried it on, it actually looked quite smart. With my pair of cheap Christmas bauble earrings, I’m set for the silly season.

I still have a lot of yarn left over so I started to do another top but this time rather than stripes, a granny square. I’ll crochet up two large squares and then join them together and using other non-sequinned stash yarn, create the ribbing and the sleeves or some neckline.

I love playing around with this craft and thankful that crochet is now another skill I can add to my crafts. It’s brought out a different creative inspiration for me as I start to use yarn like cotton or rope to create furnishings or baskets for the house.

There’s still so much to learn still with knitting but I figure if I can also know how to crochet, I can use up a lot more of the stash yarn I have about quickly. It also is versatile because you can also use any material.

Today there is a yarn club meetup at our local library which has recently been renovated. I’m thinking of going along and meeting some new ladies there to see what they’re working on. There’s a Youth Centre there too that offers different activities for teenagers and part of me thinks that I’d love to offer some time every week to teach teenagers how to knit. I’ve had this at the back of my mind for a while.

Who knows? I might plan out a “term series” on paper and see what I can do to make this a reality one day. I can’t do this for crochet, as I’m still learning myself but you never know.