Ventura Vest Lace Pattern

✓Join us at Maker Festivals Pennsylvania, the ultimate crafting extravaganza in Lancaster from July 31-August 3, 2024, and we will once again be bringing our fiber artists with us! Our festival lineup will have thousands of fiber artists, and jewelry makers!

One of the most enjoyable parts of our pattern process is getting to swatch all of the fun designs as they come in. I know swatching is generally described as anywhere from "tedious" to "despised" by many stitchers, but it's a great opportunity to tear one's eyes away from the computer and pick up some yarn for a while.


Ventura Vest by Robyn Chachula

Some swatches are fairly straightforward, used only to gauge measurement, and some swatches are more complex, an almost necessary practice of the stitch. And some are like frolicking through the meadow with ribbons in your hair.

For me, the lace stitch pattern from Robyn Chachula's Ventura Vest in Interweave Crochet Summer 2013 was of the meadow-frolic variety. Its charming petal cluster construction and natural bias kept it interesting and fun to construct. It took some concentration, though.

Robyn creates fantastic diagrams, and we never can fit all the ones we want into our limited number of pages, so I thought I'd share the extras here (fine them below the pictures below) , along with a pictorial swatch-along. The swatch instructions are slightly different from these diagrams, which show actual parts of the garment, but working with either the directions or the diagrams will be great practice for this stitch. And may induce frolics.

~ Sarah Read