Planning a crocheted skirt

I've been watching a very interesting series of videos on Youtube, called Vintage mystery crochet. A lady has some "anonymised" crochet patterns from vintage books, works them based only on the written instructions, then guesses what they could be. It's loads of fun and reminds me of the TIAS that Jane Eborall was hosting (which I always missed, to my shame) and got my fingers itching for a crochet hook.

I have a few crochet works in progress from some years ago that I got stumped on and would like to either finish or frog and start over.

One of these is a skirt in fine yarn. Which is all fine and dandy, but I gave myself the extra challenge of using variegated yarn, so not any pattern or stitch will look good. After searching high and low for patterns and stitches, I've decided to try and design it myself. It's funny, since with tatting I prefer following a pattern, but with crochet I've been mostly making most of it up as I went along. I guess I made a lot of wearables, so I personalised them a lot. And the easy "undo" feature of crochet lends itself to easy designing.

Here is my idea for the skirt so far:

The top around the waist will be unjoined rows with light invisible increase (random increase points) until the hip widest point. I would later on add a button hole tab and buttons by working on the edge of the slit.

Then I would work in the round, with regular increases, depending on the initial row length. The increases would create a whirl, which could be accented with a special stitch. Or I could go for an invisible increase.

Lacier bits can be incorporated when the skirt is long enough: open gaps or special stitches next to the increases or within the rows.

I was also thinking of adding some tatting somewhere on the edge, if I find an edging idea that fits.

I'd say that's a good plan for a start.

Now, years ago, I made a few rows, but I'm not happy with the increases, so I will frog most of it.

According to my notes, I was working one of my favourite stitches at that time, one loop single crochet. I went with single crochet because I wanted a tight stitch, so maybe I could wear this without s slip. We'll see. And the one loop only (in this case front) would create an interesting pattern in the fabric. In fact, I really like the way the yarn changes show up on it. You can see it in the main block in the pictures below.

I thought however to experiment with other stitches too, maybe I'd like others more.

I tried the moss/linen stitch. It looked interesting from the online pictures, but it's not as nice as my original idea. Plus my tension was a bit wonky, sorry about that. Dishwasher detergent makes my hands slippery. Well, one must wash dishes though! Crocheting and tatting won't exempt me from it.

Moss/linen stitch at the top 3 rows

The other idea was regular single crochet. But, as you can see, one side is a bit bland, while the other barely shows the colour in some rows.

Regular single crochet side one: kind of meh

Regular single crochet side 2: where did the colours go?

So I guess my first idea is my favourite one. What do you know! Now it's time to frog and measure and crochet and measure and... I foresee lots of frogging in my future! Heh.