A complaint often heard about crocheted garments is that they often turn out unflattering to wear. A major reason for this is that many crochet patterns don’t feature sufficient shaping. However beautiful the stitch pattern or the yarn, or both, any garment needs to be shaped to fit the wearer’s body.

In this article I will discuss an easy step towards better fit: waist shaping.

Please note: This article is aimed at altering crochet patterns for garments worked flat from the bottom upwards. I also assume that you are making a garment for yourself, thus writing ”you” instead of ”the person who will wear the finished garment. ”

Why do it?

A reality check in the mirror will confirm what you already know: your body is not a tube. Whatever your specific body shape, if you are a woman the line of your silhouette is far from straight.

So, sewing together two rectangles into a tube, calling it a sweater and hoping for it to fit, seldom works.

Tube-shaped garments often work better for children and men, since most of the time they don’t have a bust, and their hips are pretty straight.

Many classical knitted garments are worked as tubes. Maybe this is why designers often use the same technique in crochet. Knitting and crochet are different, though. Generally speaking, knitted fabrics have more stretch and drape, and therefore adapt themselves more easily to any underlaying shape. Crocheted fabrics are firmer and keep their own shape better. In my mind, crocheted fabric is somewhere between knitted and woven fabrics on the ”stretch scale”. So you can’t only look at knitting design when you design a crocheted garment or modify an existing crochet pattern. You also have to find out a little about dressmakers’ techniques, and use some of them – like waist shaping, for example.

Waist shaping makes most garments more flattering for female wearers. It is not only for the slim and slender. Ample girls can often greatly improve their looks with a waist-shaped garment. When our bodies grow (horizontally), we tend to focus on our expanding belly and butts. But our busts grow too. A straight garment which hangs down from the bust may seem like a good idea if you want to hide some of your extra weight; in reality, though, it often makes you look larger than you are. Trying to avoid this is not about self denial, but about any woman’s legitimate aim to look her best, whatever her size.

So, where to do it?

Find your waist

To include waist shaping in a pattern, you first have to find out or decide where your own waist is.

Many people have a rather clear idea about where their natural waist is, or should be, or used to be. It can be more difficult to find if you have a very straight or a very rounded figure. One tip I’ve read about (but honestly haven’t had the occasion to try yet, so if you do, I’d be happy to hear about your experiences) is to tie an elastic around your belly. You then bend from side to side until the elastic stops moving about and ”settles” at the waist. Another indication is where the waistband of your skirts and trousers usually sits. This obviously doesn’t apply to your low rise jeans…

Remembering where it is – use a measure tape

Once you’ve found your waist, or decided where it should be, measure, or have someone else measure, from your shoulder down to the waist. I’ve seen recommendations that you should take this measurement from the base of your neck down to your waist. For our purposes, I find it more practical to measure from your shoulder (mid-way between the neck and the shoulder tip). This also saves you the trouble of deciding where the base of your neck is.

If you like, you can take your measurement at the front and at the back of your body, and then calculate the average. Measuring only at the front works pretty well, too.

Note this measurement carefully. You will use it for every single crocheted top you make for yourself over many years. Your body’s width can vary every few months, but your height changes only slowly over the years.

The length of different crocheted garments may be very different, but whether you are making a cropped halter top or a full length coat, it will always hang from your shoulders. That’s why the measurement from your shoulder down to your waist will always be relevant.

From body to pattern - vertically

Now, pull out the pattern you want to adapt. If you’re lucky, it includes schematics with measurements. Otherwise, you have to carefully read through your pattern to find the total length of your garment.

From this length, you subtract the shoulder-to-waist measurement. The result is the number of inches/centimeters you will work before you reach the most narrow part of the waist. The actual shaping will have to start earlier.

From body to pattern - horizontally

For now, we will leave the ”vertical issue”, and address the ”horizontal” one. When working your garment pieces from the bottom up, where on each row will you place the shaping?

The quickest answer is: at the beginning and at the end of a row. This is just one of the options, though – but not the only one.

Before we discuss this further, go have a look in the mirror again. Stand straight, facing the mirror. Those of us who have an indented waist will spot it. The place where the waist shows is where the side seams of the garment will fall. Then turn your side to the mirror and look again. You will spot your waist again – and for many of us, the difference between the bust and the waistline, as well as the curve of your spine, will be even more obvious from this side perspective. The outline of your body that you are looking at now is not where the side seams will fall. So, there are other options for the shaping than the one we first thought of, and in some cases, they are better.

Ideally, you'll place your waist shaping where a dressmaker places waist darts – below your bust points. (”Bust points” is a delicate way to describe the ”pointiest” part of your breast, also known as the nipple).

So pull out your measuring tape again, and measure horizontally from the bust point to your side, at the point where the side seam on the finished garment will fall (you can check where this is with the help of almost any garment you own). This measurement is the distance from the side seam of the garment (before any arm-hole shaping) and the point in each row where you are going to decrease and increase to shape the waist.

You do this symmetrically of course, counting or measuring from the beginning and from the end of each row, and you do the same shaping at the back of your garment. (You don’t have a bust there, but you do have a curved spine to take into account).

Zooming in on height and depth

So, now you have four ”points” at waist level, where the most narrow part of the waist of the garment should be. But where do you start the shaping – where do you start to decrease? How long should this shaping be in height? And how many stitches do you decrease – how ”deep” should this shaping be?

Here’s where the standardized answers to your questions start to get few and far between – and where you really need to adapt the pattern to your own body shape and your own wishes.

In her excellent book ”Designing Knitwear ” (where many chapters are interesting for crocheters too), Deborah Newton suggests waist shaping darts which extend 4”/10cm to 6”/15cm above the waist, and 3”/7,5cm to 5”/12,5cm below. This can be a guideline, a point of departure – but hardly a rule.

If, like me, you have hips almost a size smaller than your bust, you might be happy to start shaping much earlier below the waist (and perhaps even start with fewer stitches than the bust-width-based pattern prescribes). If you are short-waisted (i.e. if you bust points are closer to your waist-line than in the ”standard silhouette”), you might want to increase back to bust width much more quickly.

This is a ”no rules” matter – but I’d like to suggest one anyhow: Make sure you finish the shaping well before you reach the place where your bust points will be. Trust me on this one.

Height and depth – from theory to practice

Take a garment in your wardrobe which has the same bust-width as the garment you’re going to make.

If this garment already has shaping at the waist and fits you well, just study the garment and take measurements in order to copy the fit. Measure the waist width and compare with the bust width (just below the shaping for the arm-hole).

If there are sewn darts, you can easily spot them and measure how far they go above and below the waist. If it’s difficult to spot any darts, hold your measuring tape horizontally over the garment where you measured the bust width, and let it slide downward. Note where the shaping starts and ends, always in relation to the waistline.

If the garment is straight, it is pin-time. Pin in darts, perhaps using Deborah Newton’s suggestions as a starting point for the length.

But how deep should this shaping be?

I have browsed my (rather extensive) pattern library, and noted that the difference in width between bust and waist varies wildly. In a few randomly chosen garments, taken from different books and leaflets, this difference goes from 1,5”/4cm to 7”/17,5cm!

If you just want to gently suggest that you have a waist, start off around the lower end of this scale. If you really want to show off your slender waist, try something at the higher end.

Important note: These are overall measurements. If you work your shaping in four spots, as suggested above, these measurements should be divided by four in order to know how much fabric you should ”pin in” at the deepest part of each dart.

Try on the garment (beware of the pinpoints!), have a good look and trust your own judgement. If you think the fit can be improved, pin differently and try again.

When you’re satisfied with the fit, measure the darts carefully and write down all the measurements, in inches or centimeters. Keep these notes for future reference. You can now recalculate them in rows and stitches, in order to adapt them to the gauge of the pattern you want to use right now.

So, this is the dressmaker’s way. It is not the simplest one, but it gives good results. And it is less complicated to implement than to describe, believe me. It has its limitations, though.

When this is not a good idea

Crochet can be the most simple and straightforward craft – but it’s also a wonderful technique with which you can create intricate, beautiful stitch patterns. If your stitch pattern is very complex, it may prove difficult to make decreases and increases in the middle of it. You have to try and see. In some cases, these decreases and increases can work as an interesting design feature. In other cases, they may be impossible to make without disrupting the harmony and the beauty of the stitch pattern.

In the latter case, you will have to do your shaping at the very beginning and the very end of the rows, at the side seams. You still make your decreases and increases in four different places, so the ”divide-by-four” rule still applies. But when you seam your garment, all the shaping will fall next to the side seams. This means that in the finished garment, the shaping actually occurs only in two places (the side seams), instead of being ”spread out” around your body.

If you make a very deeply indented waist shaping in this situation, chances are that the side seams will frankly speaking look weird. Therefore, it might be wise to make a more subtle shaping, just enough to suggest there actually is a waist under the garment.

A completely different option

Crochet wouldn’t be crochet if you were restricted to the two (rather similar) techniques described above. There is at least one more option: changing hook size.

This means you don’t do any decreasing or increasing at all in your stitch pattern. You simply change to a smaller hook in the area of your garment where you want to shape the waist.

You still have to find where your waist is, of course, and where on the garment you want to start and finish the shaping. You go down one hook size to start the shaping, and maybe another one in the area just around the waist. Then you change back to the middle-sized hook, and finally back to the hook you’re using in the rest of the garment.

In my opinion, this simple technique works best with lacy patterns, where the open spaces allow the fabric to keep some drape and softness even when worked with smaller hooks. You will of course make a swatch first, to check that the fabric doesn’t get too stiff when worked with a smaller hook, and to find out how many different smaller-sized hooks you want to use.

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