Lavori 07/30 progress report -- triple digits and another chart error

Yay!  I'm halfway through the rounds, and thus roughly 25% done with the knitting, give or take a bit.

There's another chart error on round 97 -- there is an asymmetry on the outside of the 5-X-5 sequences.  The right side has a yarnover while the left side has a double yarnover.  The single yarnover is correct for both spots.

I've finished the first part of the flower base, where there are a couple of rounds of garter stitch.  I've done the last crossed stitches of the lower leaves (well, second set of leaves; the first set is long finished).  The leaves have another few rounds before they finish merging into the background mesh.  There are still a LOT of stitches for barely being in the 100s, but so far it's reasonably pleasant knitting.

Things to look forward to -- more development of the flower, yay!  And I can see where the next set of leaves gets started.  Those will be around until the end of the doily, I believe.

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I can't remember if I've shared a pic of this doily before.

It's Burda 554/15.  It's really a square pattern, but I decided to experiment and see what happened if I did 5 pattern repeats instead of 4.  It was not fully successful -- I wasn't able to block it flat.  I still like how it looks.

This is what it's supposed to look like if one does 4 pattern repeats per round.

This was done early in my doily-knitting career, and it taught me some useful things about stitch counts and increase/decrease locations and the effect of relatively simple changes on the appearance of the doily.  I still am interested in those topics!

This might have been one I did simply because (a) it was small, and (b) I could read the chart without having to disassemble the chart pages from the magazine's staples.  That was definitely how I chose my first doilies from Burda 554!

First Lavori 07/30 progress report of June 2025

Just what it says...

The last leaves are starting to close and I've started on the flower, yay!

There's a chart error in round 93 -- a missing "1" in the middle of the pattern repeat, in the flower stem.  There's a small segment that should be O-1-O-1-O, and that second 1 is missing.  It's obvious when you get there.

It looks like a proper crumpled wad of thread.  I've done almost half the rounds which means I might be around 20-25% finished.  Except that it doesn't, since the stitch counts do all kinds of weird things rather than being a predictable and steady increase rate.  Whatever the true percentage of total knitting I've already done, it is clear that there is much (much, much) more to go.

I'm in no rush, luckily.

Onwards!

Memorial Day Weekend doily progress report

Plugging away on Lavor 07/30...  The leaves that started back around round 43 are finishing up.  I'm done with the crossed-stitches for the center ribs and the leaf tips are integrating into the next set of motifs.  The center leaf is turning into the flower stem in preparation for the flower, yay!, while the side two leaves will be merging into the hex mesh background, gone for good.

The new leaves that started growing at around 67 have finished with their V-1-V increasing at the centerline.  I was getting very tired of the mirrored M1 increases, so I'm happy to be done with that.  I don't think there are any more for the rest of the pattern.  There are other M1 increases, but they're not mirrored pairs.  Ditto for the crossed stitches -- I'm done with them on the three leaves, but there will be plenty more crossed stitches to come.

I finished the second partial ball of thread at the end of round 78 and am on the next partial ball.  It's a fairly big partial ball since the one I had intended to use was still attached to some crocheting done by the former owner of the thread.  I'll cut it off and/or reclaim the thread, haven't decided yet, but I didn't want to think about it so I grabbed the next yarn ball.  Any dyelot-related color changes are still subtle enough that I don't notice them, whew, and hopefully that continues.

The number of stitches per round is still climbing, oof.

I'm still enjoying myself.  It's a lot of work, but it's interesting knitting.

My travel shawl keeps getting worked on.  There are five sets of eyelet bands in the shawl, and I'm on the fourth one.  The rows keep getting ever longer so there's still plenty of knitting to go.  The yarn is still pretty and it still seems like a good pattern for this variegated long-repeat yarn.

That's about it on the current knit/spin/dye front!  Maybe I'll have some progress pics in the next post.  Or even a new project or two.

Back to the Main Quest Doily

Yay, I've resumed work on Lavori 07/30.  I'm back in the land of yarnovers as hex mesh starts separating the various leaves.  Pattern rounds that begin and end with yarnovers have also begun, which are so very characteristically Niebling-esque.  The number of stitches per round is increasing steadily.

After knitting with #40 thread for the Side Quest doily, the #30 seems like rope.  I'm close to the end of this partial ball of #30 and will soon switch to the next.  Fingers crossed, as always, that any differences in the shade of white are unnoticeable.

Another chart error -- the chart numbering jumps from 191 to 201 for no obvious reason.  So, instead of this doily being 210 rounds, it's actually 202 rounds.  Maybe there's something else going on, but if so, I'll figure it out when I get there.  There's nothing obvious going on in the photo of the doily or the instructions, and everything in the chart seems to line up properly.  Given that there are well over a thousand stitches per round by the outer parts of the doily, this means roughly 10,000 stitches I won't have to knit, which is fine by me.

Also, watch out when I get to round 105 -- I suspect there's a missing yarnover at the beginning of the pattern repeat.

That's it for today!

Side Quest doily: FdA 822

Lavori 07/30 took a quick break while I did another doily.

This is the doily from FdA 822.  I have no idea if there was a name attached, though FdA names tend to be more descriptions or random adjectives than names, really.

A friend and I did this one together, each choosing to interpret the chart symbols slightly differently.  That person has finished, and the doily is absolutely gorgeous.  I don't know if a pic has been posted yet, but we shared our photos with each other and that's how I know how nice it is.  Mine is above.  I'm reasonably pleased with it, too.

The little poof-like motifs in the middle section remind me a bit of Apache Plume seed heads.

I don't think I would have chosen to do this doily without being inspired by my fellow doily knitter.  About half of it is pattern-on-every-round.  And the outer rounds increase to a silly number of stitches.  But I do like how it turned out, so no regrets.

It turns out the every-round sections are brioche -- yarnover, slip 1, knit 2 together, offset on each round so the k2tog gets slipped and the yo-slip1 gets k2tog-ed.  That's the innermost motif and the middle motif.

The areas that aren't brioche are mostly hex mesh surrounding the other motifs as they grow and shrink.

The outer motifs are fans, with each fan consisting of three V-shaped sections separated from the other Vs of the fan by double yarnovers.  (In other words, each fan is O-V-O-O-V-O-O-V-O.)

So....

There are rounds that begin and end with yarnovers.  Some of these are typical Herbert Niebling hex mesh charting quirks.  I do the usual double-yo at the beginning of the round, with the first yarnover moving to the end of the round on the intermediate round.  (Is this a Herbert Niebling pattern?  This chart quirk is one piece of evidence pointing to him as the designer, as are the outer fan sections which are separated by double yarnovers.)

Some of them, though, are brioche yarnovers that just happen to be next to each other at the beginning and end of the round.  For those, keep them separate.  On the next round, each of the yarnovers will have something different happen, so they don't end up doing anything unfortunate to the overall design.

Also, in the every-round part, the chart will put a number (meant to be a number of knit stitches) above double yarnovers from the previous round.  For those, one does the usual thing of putting a knit and a purl into the double yarnover rather than two knits.

I changed some decrease directions (sk2p to k3t).  And I slipped stitches as if to purl.

I didn't block the doily very carefully, but it looks good anyway.  There are a few mistakes, especially in the brioche section, that I wasn't fully able to fix, but they're hard to see unless one is looking for them.

This pattern has 78 rounds, 16 pattern repeats per round.  I don't think there are any chart errors, but the knitter is expected to know how to handle the kinds of chart quirks I mentioned above.

Now back to Lavori 07/30!  At least until the next side quest.

It's also time to start thinking about the next travel project since I've been getting in some good knitting time on my travel shawl.  It's pretty, and will be more of a scarf than a shawl, as is typical for an asymmetric shallow triangle.

A Monmouth Cap

I have reached a pretty decent stopping point for the felting of a Monmouth cap I knit a few months ago.

I used Colleen Humphrey's pattern on Ravelry, which she says was done stitch-by-stitch from the extant Monmouth cap that is (or was) in the Nelson on Museum & Local History Centre (now known as the Monmouth Museum) in the UK.  Here's a link to the pattern (it's a free pdf download): https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/monmouth-cap-the-details-matter

Here is what the hat looked like fresh off the needles.

      

I used some Cascade 220 remnants, probably a bit more than one 100-gram skein.  It is knit 2-stranded, in the round, on whatever random big needle one has lying around.  Then it is felted down to size.  I used the washer/dryer rather than felting by hand, because I am lazy.

The first few rounds of felting were a bit unsatisfactory -- the felting was uneven, with some areas felting well and others almost completely unfelted.  But today I ran it through one more load of laundry, washer and dryer, and it felted sufficiently well.  I'll let it be and think about whether it would benefit from anything else.

I'd like to have a knitted hat that is relatively windproof as well as warm, and also somewhat water-resistant.  We'll see if this one works.

Warm, water-resistant, and wind-proof are my goals for things like hats.  I've knit a few that come pretty close.  We'll see if this one joins that rare club.  These days, I rarely take 6am walks when it's 0F and blizzarding.  So the warmth requirements aren't quite so hardcore.  Even so, wind is probably the biggest enemy of warmth.  I'm hoping this felted hat will be up to the task.

The hat fits slightly loosely around my temple (though it feels a bit snug going on, probably because there's not much elasticity left in the cast-on).  It does have a bit of a slouchy top, the air space that the hat is supposed to have.  Most sources claim that the hat is supposed to be worn above the ears.  I like to pull them down over my ears so that my ears stay warm.

It was fun to knit.  I've already knit one as a gift.  The previous one felted without any weirdnesses, though I didn't try to felt it down quite as much.  This one is for me.  I might well keep knitting them, just because.

The Monmouth Cap is a style of knitted hat that was popular in the UK between the 15th and 18th century, and is similar to a lot of European hats of that time period.

Someday I'll write about other warm hats I've knit in addition to the everyday hats that don't need to be quite as warm.  I have to go back through what I posted way back when to see if I already talked about them.

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I'm almost done with a <80-round doily that is a mini-KAL with someone else.  The pattern has some things that the other person found puzzling.  We got that figured out.  Then the other person decided that the photo didn't match the chart, and came up with a variant that looks a lot more like the photo.  Given the vagaries of charting, both variants are perfectly reasonable interpretations of the chart symbols.

The other person is done.  I will wait until pics have been posted before I write much more.  I am the follower rather than the leader of this KAL and it only seems right to let the other person post about the project before I do.

Is that sufficiently cryptic?

Anyway, I am looking forward to being done with this little doily so I can return to Lavori 7/30.

End of April 2025 progress report (Lavori 07/30 and the travel shawl)

Here's a recent progress pic of Lavori 07/30.  The early section of hex mesh is completely done and I'm in the stretch with no yarnovers.  I'm also in a short stretch within that where the stitch number will stay constant for a few pattern rounds.  The leaf ribs that are indicated by the V1V stitch sequence are turning into simple crossed stitches.  This section of doily is nothing but leaves!

I ran into the first chart error, in round 55.  There's a missing V symbol early in the pattern repeat.  It's very obvious when you get there.

The first partial ball of this white Clark's Big Ball #30 ran out in the 20s, not too long after I transitioned from dpns to a circular needle.  It was only a tiny amount and I'm glad it went as far as it did.  The next ball is close to done.  Will it make it to round 70?  I guess I'll find out.  I have at least two more partial balls before breaking into the first full ball (or presumably full, since these are all thrift store finds and there's no guarantee).  My guess is that I'll have knit about 200 to 250 ish yards of thread by the time this ball runs out.

So far it's been fun.  I'm on the 32" needle, so I suppose I can justify sneaking in a small doily every now and then while this is in progress, and even more so after I move to the 47" needle.

Here's a quick view of my travel project.  It's the Touchstone shawl from Ravelry, designed by Laura Aylor, worked in one of the Zauberball sock yarn gradients.  I've done the third set of eyelet blocks thanks to a bit of good travel knitting time this past weekend.  I have no idea if I'll have enough yarn to get all the way to the 5-block set as the pattern calls for, if I'll have lots of yarn left after that, or what.  I guess I'll find out!  The gauge is a little loose but it's still pretty reasonable.

I keep looking at my yarn stash and thinking about thicker yarns and non-lace.  So maybe I'll get inspired and cast on a few more projects.  I really do need more.