Haute Mesh

Pick a knit that will add a touch of colour in the winter gloom, courtesy of Kenzo.

You will need

A grey coat (Mine cost £8 from a charity shop. It's more like a long, hooded cardigan, meaning it doubles nicely as a slanket)

Needle and thread

4mm crochet hook

Two 100g balls of Bonus DK mustard yellow wool (£1,69 each at Hobbycraft), one in grey and one in black

Lots of time and patience

Difficulty

Moderate

I'm going to say moderate because this one all depends on your chops with crocheting. Master the triple crochet stitch and you're laughing.

Time

I'm going to say 2 industrious, balls-to-the-wall weekends. Totting up the time I recall spending on the project, my ball-park figure would be 25-30 hours so spreading that over 4 weekends is probably better for your sanity than the way I went about it!

Mesh it up!

In order to get a good grid effect that has the slight vertical texture of the Kenzo original, I used the triple stitch on its side,on all pieces except for the striped cuffs.

Crochet two of each of the following pieces. Print or copy them to the dimensions specified and rotate each piece 90 degrees (except for the striped cuffs) so that the triple stitch is on its side on the final garment.

Join your pieces together at the side edges (i.e. the short ones) so that they form tubular shapes.

Join the black and grey pieces together, with the grey at the top and the black at the bottom, using a normal crochet stitch.

Join the top edges of the grey panels to the top edges of your yellow sleeves, again, using a normal crochet stitch.

Join the striped cuffs to the bottoms of your yellow sleeves.

Mark out four diagonal lines on the sleeves, each one for stitches wide and four stitches apart from the adjacent lines. cover your lines with a normal crochet stitch in black (NB: don't go along the tops like I did. It's not how the original looks and it's a nightmare to get it to look straight and neat)

Using a needle and thread, hand-stitch your sleeves in place at the shoulders and cuffs. You may need to stretch out your garment a bit as you stitch, so that it ruches when you let go. The original's sleeves have a draped, baggy effect, so that was how I copied them with mine

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