Crochet Diary - Angel Top by Namaste & Crochet -

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Attention busty girls! Do you live in fear of your ta-ta’s becoming the main attraction after slipping them into your crochet masterpiece? Scared your puppies will pop out over dinner? I took my Angel Top by Namaste and Crochet out for a test run and am reporting back with the modifications I made to make sure the girls stay put!

Errata at the bottom.

I’m always wary of cotton. The biggest issue is I just don’t trust that it’s not going to stretch out and leave me with something 5 sizes bigger than I originally crocheted. Cotton for me has always been used for accessories. Honestly, the only reason why is my breasts.

Being a UK 36E, I’m very blessed in the chest department and I invest a significant amount of money in architectural marvels to keep gravity at bay, and my boobs under my chin. So would I trust cotton to fulfill the same job that I usually leave to wires and nylon?

Yes – but with a few modifications.

The beauty of the Angel Top pattern comes with its flexibility. The corseted back means one size fits all, and the cups are fully customisable. The instructions are a bit lacking in this area, but once you’ve worked to a size L you should have come to grips with the repetition in order to figure out the rest.

The pattern calls for Worsted weight yarn – which, believe it or not, is not a thing in the UK. We jump straight from DK to Aran with nothing in between. Luckily, I have a small stash of Drops Safran tucked away and with this being a Sport weight, holding 2 together got me to Worsted.

Crocheting holding 2 yarns together made the whole item feel more ‘structured’. So my worry about my boob-support drifted to whether the back piece would have enough drape. After finishing, it wasn’t as big a concern as I thought it would be.

Have loads of Drops Safran in your stash? Here’s another pattern I made!

I got gauge across the stitches, but not across the row count- so I made my Angel Top in a size M, because after eyeballing the cup against me, it looked fine.

The hardest part of this whole top was actually trying to lace it up alone! I didn’t complete the large chains to make the ties – in part because I was being lazy, but secondly, it was because I didn’t have faith that the cotton wouldn’t stretch out and leave me blushing. So I completed the piece and then added a doubled-up nylon corset cord. This meant that the ties weren’t ‘slippy’ and tying them once, should be enough to keep them in place all day. The top has yet another layer of rigidity!

I thought I’d be clever and try and use the same cord to lace around the neck, and then down the back – but this was a mistake. You need the dual support around the neck and around the back- just like a bra!

I also increased the length of the piece by repeating the solid and eyelet sections another 3 times as I have a long torso – for me, this took the top from a ‘bra’ to an actual ‘I can have lunch with my parents wearing this’ top.

I continued the eyelet section down the sides all the way to the end of my extension so that I could lace further down.

Errata: because we all make mistakes, right?

I saw a few people pointing out issues with the Angel Top pattern on Ravelry, these are a couple minor things I found.

In the bust section: Ch1 does not count as a stitch (is stated as a stitch).

In the cups section, I found the repetition hard to follow row-by-row. This is because you actually miss the final hdc before working into the ch-sp and so the numbers don’t flow through the pattern sequentially and symmetrically, which can make it hard to memorise.

I also only came to 35 ch-sps along the bottom row. I did Ch2 instead of Ch1 eyelets (106 sts along bottom) because I found the Ch2’s to be too taught, and I worried that the top would pinch when it was finally tied.

All in all, this is a really simple pattern that I enjoyed making over a couple of nights. Dominique has done a tremendous job showing just how crochet can be classy!