Go Hard Or Go Home: DIY Rodarte Dress

DIY Rodarte Dress and DIY Rodarte Leggings, worn with an American Apparel liquid-look black bra, Burberry boots and a Gerard Yosca necklace.

Even though I half-ass a lot of things in my life (dish washing, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping...), when it comes to work and creative projects I believe that if you're going to do something, you may as well do it right: go hard or go home.  The DIY Rodarte knit stockings and the DIY Rodarte diamond cut leggings that I made a while back were all just part of the buildup to making the Rodarte dress of that I've been dreaming of since it came down the runways of their Spring 09 show.  Here's how I did it.

What you need:

Size 10 circular knitting needles

Size 10 or medium sized crochet hook

Size 5 or small crochet hook

Yarn needle

5-10 different colored and textured mohair yarns of your choice, 1 skein each

Bits of metal chain

Metal Ring

1. This was one of the many original inspiration pieces that I wanted to base this dress off.  The best part about DIY is getting to really make the piece your own.  I didn't really like the colors of this particular dress, so I chose a darker blue and black palette with shocks of white, sparkling grey, pink and violet.  I already was lucky enough to have it all on hand (I got it for free from my old job as an Assistant Knitwear designer at Sweetface), since all of the mohair and angora knits that I used are actually very very expensive, which is part of the reason that the real Rodarte pieces are astronomically priced.


2. While the skirt of this dress is more tightly knit than my dress, I chose to go with the cobweb style loose/sloppy knit of their Fall 08 collection.  To make the skirt, I cast on 100 stitches, reducing 10 stitches every 5 rows until I had a total of approximately 25 rows, with the last row being 50 stitches, and tight enough to form a decent waistline.

3. This is where the dress gets very tricky to explain.  I chose to crochet the entire top half of the dress, using a large crochet hook.  I never follow any patterns, and always feel like it's the most intuitive to improvise it as I go along until I feel like it looks right.  The Rodarte dress lends itself to this kind of haphazard technique since it is meant to look a bit like a hodgepodge knit collage.  I had wanted to incorporate a chain at the waistband, like the original, but I couldn't find anything that satisfied me, so I chose to only use the metal ring and a small bit of chain, which I crocheted to the base of the dress.  I turned the skirt around, and added a crochet backbone section of sorts that extended from the waistband of the dress.

4. I crochet the top separately, starting with a circle for the base, and then crocheting the front and the back parts individually, whip stitching the shoulder lines together with a yarn needle.  I then took the two sections of crochet that I had attached to the skirt, and stitched them on to the front and the back of the crochet top.

5. To finish, I used the small crochet hook to crochet small wispy white strands around the ribcage area.

Sorry if this DIY is poorly explained and difficult to follow, but really most of it was improvised.  I'm happy to answer any questions or make any clarifications.  And if you do chose to make this and blog about it, please don't forget to give us credit!

-Tiffany