Lily of the Valley

A lily of the valley by any other name would still have as many knit-seven-togethers.

OK, that's not quite what Shakespeare wrote.  And probably not anything Herbert Niebling was known to mutter while designing another of his doilies with lily of the valley motifs.

This is Convallaria.  And it's also Maiglockchenflor.  And maybe other names, too, but those are the names of the pattern in the two sources I have for it.  Both of those names translate to lily of the valley, more or less.

It is a fairly complex doily for its size.  There are all of the flowers -- seventy-two k7-tog maneuvers, along with some associated k4-tog, k3-tog, SK2P, and related fun.  There are the lovely asymmetric leaves.  There's all the hexagonal mesh, with all of the double yarnovers and decreases.  There's the characteristic Niebling trait of starting and ending pattern repeats with yarnovers, with nary a mention in the pattern that this could be an issue at the beginning and end of the round.  And there are many, many stitches per round.

It was fun to knit.

Here's a close-up that shows most of one pattern repeat.  There isn't a lot of symmetry in this pattern.  There are three leaves per pattern repeat.  Each one is different.  Same with the flower stalks -- three flower stalks, each one different.  The hexagonal mesh develops differently in each of the spaces between flowers and leaves.

But the results are beautiful.

If you knit the pattern, be careful how you transition from the tops of the flowers to the round that is only hexagonal mesh.  Both the chart and the written version of the pattern had an issue that meant that the hexagonal mesh wouldn't line up properly for the entire pattern repeat.  I had to do a bit of cussing and improvisation at that point.  But all went well enough.

I don't know if there is an in-print source of the Convallaria version of the pattern, which is charted.  I don't know if there are other chart sources or other names for this pattern.  The written version of the pattern, Maiglockchenflor, is in print, in Gloria Penning's Old World Treasures.  You can buy Old World Treasures from Gloria Penning or from any reputable dealer who carries books on lace and doilies.  There are several unattributed Niebling patterns in Old World Treasures as well as many pretty designs by Lillie Meitler.

I wrote about this doily several years ago, as being on my list of doilies I wanted to do someday.  I hadn't remembered that!  Now I can check that off the list.  I don't think I'll knit this again, but I'm glad that I did finally knit it, all seventy-two knit-seven-togethers and all.

Next up, I think, will be something with a lot of symmetry and no knit-seven-togethers.