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.

Lavori 07/30 progress report and a Brioche circular-knit cowl pattern (Brioche all the things!)

No photos, but I've finished round 52 of Lavori 07/30.  That's almost a quarter of the rounds, but, sigh, barely 5% of the doily. (1/4 of the rounds is 1/16 of the area.)  The first sections of hex mesh are closing up and the first set of leaves are growing.  There won't be any yarnovers at all from round 54 through round 70, though after that, I believe there will be yarnovers in all of the rest of the rounds.

With the hex mesh area closing up quickly, and the leaves growing quickly, the lace fabric is bending and distorting.  What fun!  It won't be fully visible until blocking.

These leaves are growing by making increases along the center line -- m1, k1, m1.  The chart uses the V symbol to indicate the increase where one picks up the running thread between two stitches and knits into the back of it.  I'm making these symmetric -- m1L, k1, m1R.  Will it matter?  I don't know.  At some point, after the leaves have reached their final width and the increases are finished, the center line will be denoted by 2 crossed stitches.

The edges of the leaves are outlined in twisted stitches.  I am not twisting them on the intermediate rounds.  They seem to be there to indicate a separation between each leaf, in this area where the leaves abut each other.  I decided to leave this as a fairly soft separation by only twisting on the pattern rounds.  Was that the right choice?  I don't know.  Later, at the base of the flower, there is a big block of twisted knits.  I will probably twist those to create a stronger rib-like line.

As the area of hex mesh shrinks, I'm using directional double-decreases -- the indicated SK2P for a left-leaning decrease and K3T for a right-leaning decrease.

Even without yarnovers for the next dozen or so rounds, I'll be kept busy with more make-1 increases, twisted knits, crossed stitches, and a big decrease (K5T) when the hex mesh area finally closes up for good.  When the yarnovers start up again, it'll be time to watch for pattern repeats that begin and end with yarnovers, which will happen off and on until round 200 or so

There are more stitches than strictly necessary, but it's not too ridiculous yet.  I suppose the extra stitches are needed in order to give the lace fabric enough stitches to be able to stretch and compress around the stacked increases and decreases.

I'm on my second partial ball of vintage Big Ball #30.  Hopefully they'll all be similar enough to look reasonable in one project, and hopefully I have enough to complete the project.  I will no doubt keep saying that until the doily is finished and blocked.

I think that's all I wanted to write down.  The knitting is not going particularly quickly, probably because there aren't long stretches of plain stockinette.  I keep messing up parts of the pattern repeats, but so far, I've noticed and fixed them pretty quickly.  There's one spot that I think is still there that is too much of a pain to completely fix, but it won't be noticeable as long as I don't mess up the rest of that motif. 

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Brioche all the things!

That was my knitting group's unofficial motto for a while.  My friends were all doing brioche and I was inspired to join in on the fun.  Not only do I easily succumb to temptation, I knew that brioche can break up the weird striping, stacking, and pooling that can happen with variegated yarns.  Sometimes that's what one wants, but other times, it's not.  I had some small batches of variegated yarn that weren't quite fitting with any of my ideas and I wanted them out of my stash.  So, I knit a brioche scarf and then a few circular-knit cowls.  Then I dithered about what to do next and got distracted by something else.  Luckily for me, I wrote down how I did the cowls.

Brioche knitted cowl

Cast on a likely number of stitches.  Cast on loosely since the brioche is going to be very stretchy!  For the cowl in the photo, I think it was 74 stitches because I used a long-tail cast-on and that's how many stitches I got before the yarn tail ran out.

Set-up rnd: k1, sl1yo

Rnd 1: sl1yo, brp

Rnd 2: brk, sl1yo

Notice the 2 yos that occur next to each other at the end of rnd 2 and the beginning of rnd 1.

sl1yo = slip1 as if to purl, yarnover (can be done as a single maneuver)

brp = purl the slipped stitch from the previous round together with its yarnover.

brk = knit the slipped stitch from the previous round together with its yarnover.

When ready to cast-off:

Final round: k1, p1 (doing the brp or brk as necessary)

Then cast off in pattern.  Again, keep the cast-off very loose to match the elasticity of the brioche.

Hmm, maybe I should go fishing in the stash for suitable yarn and make a few more brioche things, whether cowls or scarves or something else entirely.  I still have some fun variegated yarn that I haven't quite figured out what to do with.  Brioche is a possible answer.

Cast on! Lavori 07/30

I think I have enough full and partial balls of white Clark's Big Ball #30 crochet thread to do this doily -- somewhere in the 1500 to 2000 yard range.  And I think the balls are all close enough in color.

So I cast on!

I am starting with the smallest balls (partial balls, either bought that way or left over after a previous doily) and working my way up.

I'm already up to round 30 after an hour or two of knitting, not that it's all that much considering how many more tens or hundreds of thousands of stitches I have left.  But so far it's been fun, with some hex mesh growing between columns of knit stitches.  On the next round I'll be starting the first set of leaves which will be at the base of the big flower motif.  I guess the columns of knit stitches are the stems of those flowers.

Once the doily is on one of my longer needles (probably at least a 32"), I'll give myself permission to do smaller doilies even while the longer one is in progress.  There are at least 3-4 smaller ones on my to-do list that I was dithering about before starting this one, as is obvious from my previous posts.

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Here's a bonus small doily pic.  I don't think I've posted this before.

This is Lavori 11/40.  It is 36 rounds and knit from leftover DMC Cebelia #30.  I do like DMC Cebelia more than Clark's Big Ball, but eh, I'll use what I have.  I like Cordonnet even more than Cebelia, and #40 and #50 more than #30, but it's not like I have a lot of that lying around, either.  This doily has 8 pattern repeats per round and no chart errors (or at least none I mentioned at the time).

I think the thread is the same as I used for Duchrow 64/05, which I posted a photo of a few weeks ago.  I'm pretty sure that the main thing made with this thread was Primula, a Marianne Kinzel design from the First Book of Modern Lace Knitting.  I'm pretty sure I made at least one or two more small doilies from the leftovers.  Dunno if any of this green thread is left or if it's all been turned into doilies, crocheted into snowflakes, and used in weaving/braiding projects.

I really should do a bunch of quick little doilies (<50 rounds) and put them into metal rings to use as sun catchers and wall decorations and other gift-like presentations.  It's been a while since I've done that.

A quick doily -- Beyer 7014/09B

 

This is Beyer 7014/09B, the small octagonal doily of a 5-piece set.  It's 36 rounds and, as the name implies, 8 pattern repeats per round.  There are no chart errors.

Three of the 5 doilies in this set are found in Burda 418, as doilies 31 to 33.  I've knit those.  So why not add the other two of the set if I don't have any better ideas?  There's one left to go -- the larger hexagon, 7014/09C, which can also be blocked as an oval, not that I am likely to deliberately block it into an oval.  Dunno if/when I'll get to it, but it's also a fairly small doily at 58 rounds.

The slight lopsidedness of the photo is due to the angle from which I took the pic -- it takes things that are mostly regularly shaped and adds vaguely trapezoidal distortions.

It was a quick knit.  I cast on in the afternoon and was finished the same evening, and this was pick up and put down knitting rather than anything intensive.

There are some other cute sets in Beyer 7014, as I've already mentioned.  Many were reprinted in Burda Folge 2 (also known as Burda 305) or other Burda specials.  Some of the sets look like fun and others look like a pain.  As usual, I will knit whatever appeals to me.  If I like knitting it and like how it looks, I often enjoy having other variations to try.

Since I do not live the doily lifestyle, I have no use for lacy doily sets.  I just knit them.

I feel like mentioning that the doily shown on the back cover of Beyer 7014 really appealed to me when I first saw it.  There's something very swoon-worthy over the way the leaves distort.  It wasn't in the magazine.  It took me a while to track down the pattern -- variations are in various Burda publications and also a Diana publication.  I only knit one motif as a standalone doily but enjoyed it greatly.  One of these days I'll post a pic.

What's next?  I'm not sure, though of course Beyer 7014/09C is a strong contender.

I'm in the middle of the most recent commissioned tablet-woven band, as I think I've already written about, while thinking about what I want to do when the commissions are finished.  I'm also thinking about hauling out my marudai, inspired by Claudia Wollny's latest kumihimo Youtube video on Kawari Yatsu Gumi #1.  Plus, as always, more fingerloop and freehand or disk braiding.  But those are topics for another blog, not this one.

To get back to knitting, I've been trying to felt the Monmouth Cap, mostly by getting it very wet and throwing it in the dryer with towels, though it did go through a couple of washer/dryer cycles with other batches of clothing/towels/linens.  It's being a little frustrating -- some parts of felting nicely, while others still have a lot of stitch definition and aren't felting much at all.  I guess I'll keep going since the hat still needs to shrink more.  I want all of it to be felted since it'll be a lot more windproof that way.  If necessary, I suppose I'll have to finish it up by hand so I can personally target the areas that need more attention.  I wonder why it is behaving this way?  I don't usually have this problem with washer/dryer felting.

The cat bed is still occupied by cats so I haven't bothered to try to felt it.  They don't care.  I guess I'll wait until it needs washing.  That way, I can be sure to felt some cat hair into it, too.

Other than that, it's the usual thinking about potential projects -- More hats?  How about mittens and fingerless mitts?  Start making socks again?  Or the next handspun travel-project shawl?  And the next sweater for me?  And so on!  I still want to make a doily rug someday but that's not really occupying much brain space at the moment since it's the same category as other stash-buster projects.

I really do need to decide on what thread to use for Lavori 07/30 so I can start that, too.  Though as long as I keep knitting some kind of doily without getting too bored or frustrated, it's all good.  Once I start the big one, it'll be a while before I get back to smaller doilies again.

FdA 684 (Etoile à huit branches)

Done and blocked.  It was a fun knit and I like the results.  Yay!

Here's the other orientation, though I'm not sure how it related to the orientation from which I took the photo:

Hmm, I like both views.

I'm probably going to warp up for some tablet weaving next -- commission weaving (i.e. someone asked me to make them some things), but it ought to be very straightforward after I get everything threaded and tensioned.

As for doilies, I'm vaguely considering banging out a few quickie doilies while I dither about thread for Lavori 7/30.  Today's thought is about how there are all the cute sets of doilies in Beyer Kunststricken Heft 4 (7014), most or all of which are also in Burda Folge 2 (305), for example.  I've knit some, but not all, and they're all very manageable in size.  There are also some MEZ sets where I've knit the larger doily or doilies, but not the smaller sizes.  Not that I need to knit the full set, of course.  In particular, I am not a huge fan of most oval doilies or multi-motif doilies.  I don't mind the ovals that can be blocked round or that take their shape without needing to cut the thread and knit wings.  I also am fine with turning multi-motif doilies into single-motif doilies.  Oh, and a lot of the knitting pattern collections have small, simple doilies in addition to the bigger, more elaborate ones.  Those too would be quick to knock out.  Or I could see what small Engeln doilies seem enticing, though with those, I often do scale up to one of the larger ones that he builds from the small centers.  I've knit all or almost all of the Kinzel small doilies; I could knit more since they're all lovely, but I'm more likely to choose something new.

But you never know.  I'm easily distracted.

In other knitting news: I've definitely chosen the Touchstone Shawl by Laura Aylor as my next travel project.  I started making progress on it a week or two ago, and it pleases me enough to keep going.  I'm using one of the variegated sock yarns (Zauberball Crazy) and it's a good match.  The shawl is of the asymmetric triangle/crescent style, where increases happen on one side with some compensating decreases on the other side.  There are occasional bands of simple lace, so the hardest part is counting the number of ridges between lace bands.  And of course it doesn't matter if I miscount every now and then.  My gauge is a trifle looser than I like but it looks good and I don't care enough to take it out and start over.  I've outgrown the 24" bamboo needle and have switched to a long circular.  It should keep me out of trouble for a while.

I still need to finish felting my Monmouth Cap, and also give a bit of thought to the Next Sweater.  It'll be for me, probably, and will probably (but maybe not!) use handspun.  Plus a few more things, but if I think about it too hard, I'll get stuck in an analysis-paralysis loop and then will sit and twitch with nothing getting done.  Sigh.

Easily distracted

I still think I want to do Lavori 7/30.  But while I dither over thread I'm getting distracted by other things.

Dither:  I have a fair amount of vintage Clark's Big Ball 30.  But would I rather use something finer and better quality?  Is what I have actually one color or is it two (white and ivory, maybe, or perhaps two slightly different shades of white)?  And will I need closer to 1500 yards or 2000 yards?  Should I use the big batch of vintage #50 thread (2200-ish yards), or should I save that for another project?  Should I buy something and if so, what?  Even mail order doesn't have the selection that used to be in all the stores back when these magazines were being published.  Also, the prices for good quality thread for doily-knitting are a lot higher, which I suppose isn't particularly surprising.  And at least some of the brands that used to have many colors now only do white and ecru.

Here's what the doily looks like in Lavori 7, by the way.  It's hard to discern the details, but it's obviously very Niebling-esque.  Isn't it adorable?  It has 210 rounds, so it will take quite a while once I get started.

While I was dithering, I cast on FdA 684.

It is a charmingly silly pattern, again, with very typical Niebling-esque touches.  Is it from his design house?  I'm not sure, but it uses motifs and stitch combos he's known for, and it's from FdA, which is known to have printed a lot of his patterns.  Whoever the designer was, it's a very clean design, satisfying to knit.  There's a minor chart error in round 25 but it's easy to recognize given the overall symmetry of the design.

I decided to use a colorful ball of thrift store vintage Clark's Big Ball 30.  It's a very bright salmon/coral pink.  The ball claims to have 250 yards, so with 78 rounds in the pattern, I knew it would be close.

I ditched at round 76.  Round 77 was just stockinette so this was a simple fix.  The cast-off above didn't look right so I changed that a bit, too.  It's marginally possible I could have knit round 77 and still had enough for the cast-off, but I can't say that with a lot of confidence.  And I definitely wouldn't have been able to add round 78.

So...  note to self -- 250 yards won't go as far as I hope.  Stick to shorter patterns.  Will I believe myself next time?  Who knows?  I have a few more balls of this thread in different colors.

I'll have a better pic for the next post, but here's the doily pinned out on a big piece of cardboard.  I wasn't as careful as I should be, but it's OK.  As usual, the slightly trapezoidal perspective is due to me standing above the doily when I took the pic.  Ditto for the shadow at the bottom of the photo.

Will I get distracted by other short or short-ish doilies while dithering about Lavori 7/30?  I guess I'll find out!

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Sechsblatt, from Frau und Mutter:

Here's a pic of another red doily, though it's a different shade of red.  I knit it many years ago.  Yeah, the photo sucks, but that's true of most of my photos.

This is a credited Herbert Niebling pattern.  It's called Sechsblatt and it's from Kunststricken Nr 476, also known as Frau und Mutter.

I like this pattern because it's actually a rather clumsy design as well as not having any of the fancy tricks that we all know and love from Niebling's most elaborate designs.  The way that the inner motif has 6 pattern repeats and the outer motif has 10 is something that I find rather odd.

It was a very quick knit, not surprising since it's only 34 rounds.

I do like the inner star/flower motif, and there's nothing wrong with any individual element or even how they all go together.  I've knit many of this type of doily, and should probably knit even more since they're a good size to give away or to fit inside a macrame hoop as a sun-catcher.

It's also good reminder that there are many lovely patterns that don't have immediately-identifiable designers, and that all of the designers made generic-ish patterns as well as identifiable ones.  It's a good way for designers to experiment with motifs that often show later up in larger patterns.

Frau und Mutter has several other very attractive designs as well as some I find awkward-looking.  Most patterns are credited to Niebling, though at least one of the designs recorded on Ravelry is credited to Duchrow.

FdA 958

Here it is:

I like it, of course.

Here's a close-up of the floral motifs:

Now on to the next doily!  Which starts by dithering over whether I have enough thread to make Lavori 7/30 and if it's good enough quality.

I expect the 210-round doily to take somewhere between 1500 and 2000 yards of thread.  Do I have 2000 yards of anything I'm willing to use?  Is 2200 yards of thread excessive?  Is 1600 yards enough?

Also, the vintage Clark's thread is kind of meh in quality, or at least the #30 is.  I might have enough of it, but should I try to get something better?  A large doily is a serious time commitment.

Luckily I have plenty of other things to distract me while I dither.

Today's doily post -- Blocking FdA 958 and other related musings

FdA 958 is done and on the blocking board.  My blocking board is currently a large-ish flattened cardboard box.  But it works well enough given that I'm not trying particularly hard to do a really precise job.

Here is the doily, all pinned out and drying:

I stood at the bottom of the box when taking the photo so everything is slightly trapezoidal.

Initial thoughts...

The flower motifs aren't all that distinct in spite of the textural tricks that are in the pattern.  Crossed stitches, k5tog, purls, twisted stitches, nine-to-five decreases -- it's all pretty muted.

The above is a close-up of the flower motifs from two repeats.  It was fun to knit, but the results are underwhelming, alas.  Simpler texture stitches would have been just as effective, I suspect.  Or maybe it would have been better in a different-weight thread, or done with a less gauzy knitting gauge.

I still have no idea what flower it is supposed to represent, if any.

Also, I had a consistent problem with the lines of yo-sk2p-yo.

As you can see, the right-hand side is very consistently larger/looser than the left hand side.  I had a similar though less obvious problem with general yarnovers, too -- the last one in the fan motif before doing a leaf motif is smaller than the first one of the fan motif after a leaf motif.  I'm not sure if this is happening during the pattern round, or if it's something about how the stitches shift around on the intermediate round.  But it's kind of depressing to see, and I'll have to think about if/how/whether I can do anything to minimize this in future doilies.

I don't think it made any real difference that I twisted the k-tbls on the intermediate rounds in the early part of the doily.  The purled purls also do not stand out in any way -- perhaps they'd be a little more noticeable as garter stitch than purls?  Or maybe it doesn't matter.

I made a few mistakes in the doily.  Or rather, made a mess in a few places with dropped stitches or whatever that were hard to recover perfectly.  My imperfect repairs are not at all obvious.

The pattern is 104 rounds, there are 8 pattern repeats per round, and the chart is error-free.  It was fun to knit.  I'm not disappointed in the results -- no regrets at all!  I like the silly motifs and enjoyed seeing/experiencing how the designer developed the different layers of motifs.

It is very Niebling-esque, so this is either a pattern from his design house, or from a designer using his known motifs to create a variation on a theme.

I'll make another post with a picture after the doily is dry and unpinned.  And then this doily will get stuffed into a drawer with all the others.  Though it's actually a box/bin these days.  I have too many finished doilies for the drawer.  I do give some away or it would be even worse.

I used about 75-80% of the 50g ball of DMC Cebelia #30.  There's enough left for another doily if the doily isn't too big.  Depending on the pattern, something between 40 and 60 rounds might be possible.

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More double-decrease musings -- not that this is terribly profound or anything, but in addition to the effects of changing around which stitch is on top (and thus the direction of the decrease), one can knit through back loops, slip stitches as if to purl so that they're twisted when they pass over the others, take the lower two stitches in a different order, and so on.

For FdA 958, I slipped a stitch as if to knit, knit 2 together, then passed the slipped stitch over.  The slipped stitches were open rather than twisted after going over the live stitches.  Ditto for the 9-to-4 decrease that closed off the main part of the flowers.

For the k5tog, I simply did a k5tog, nothing fancy about the order in which the stitches were taken.  They are right-leaning decreases, period.  Sometimes I could get all five stitches in one fell swoop.  Other times, I'd knit 2 or 3 together, then pass the next few over, one at a time, being careful to not drop them all off the needle.

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OK, so now it's time for doily dithering!  It's both fun and stressful.

I could use the rest of the Cebelia 30 to make a small doily.  I have several candidates in mind -- there are tons of cute little patterns I could bang out.

There are other FdA doilies that are <100 rounds or so that appeal to me.

Or I could do another serious project.

At the smaller end (in terms on number of rounds), there's the vintage probably-FdA Napperon Carré pattern I mentioned earlier -- French, words only, the left column slightly cut off so it'll be hard to see what's going on until I get there (unless I chart it out first).  It's a bit more complicated to deal with than if it was simply a chart, so that's why I am calling this a potential "serious" project.  The main doily is 88 rounds.  Then one does a crochet cast-off, and then picks up stitches from those loops to do an edging.  That goes to round 112 and then one does the second and final cast-off.  And of course I could just do the center part and skip the outer edging, maybe doing a few rounds of knit stitches to give it a border of sorts.

If I want to do something larger, there's Gloxiniaeflora, which always seems to fall into the "next time for sure!" category for me.  This doily is 168 rounds, so it's more of a commitment than a <120 round doily.  It's a lovely design, but maybe I should keep the ideal in my head rather than being disappointed in its reality.  In particular, the flowers worry me -- will they be distinct little motifs or will they be kind of muddy, the way that the flowers of Lavori 7/18 Centrino "Le Campanelle" turned out to be?

Or should I do a >200 round doily?  I don't think I yet have the stamina (or thread) for a 300+ round doily.  But there are some fabulous ones that are 200-250 rounds, give or take a bit, and I feel capable of slogging through something of that size.  In particular, I'm thinking of one of the Lavori 7 doilies -- Lavori 7/30 Centro Copritavolo.  It's the cover doily and is wonderfully Niebling-esque.  There are flowers and leaves and plenty of hex mesh.  It's a bit weird-looking but not too bizarre.

I love a couple of other obscure big doilies from Lavori 7 -- figures 31 and 10 -- but both are over 300 rounds and I don't think I want to take them on just yet.  I'm also fond of figure 5 "Le Campanule" at 252 rounds, but if/when I do that one, I'll probably use the charts from Burda 554/35.  Hmm, I also someday want to do 554/33, also known as Pfingstrose, a 176 round pattern.  Plus there are a few more Burda 554 doilies on my to-do list, and also some of the other Lavori 7 doilies.  (and then I go off on a tangent of everything I want to do someday...)

Ahem.  My want-to-do list is very long.  But I'm trying to keep my choices from overwhelming me into analysis paralysis.

Today I'm inclined towards Lavori 7/30, assuming I have enough thread or can easily acquire enough.

And of course I might well do something else entirely!

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Anything non-doily to add?  Hmmm, not really, though I still do need to cast on and/or commit to a few knitting projects so I'll have something for meetings and travel and such.  And ditto for the other things I do.  My guess is that I'll probably do a bit of tablet-weaving before getting serious about a large doily.  But maybe not.  With a large doily, I know it'll be a long-term project so I can multi-task rather than concentrating on only the one thing.

And because I feel a need to share -- today I found a small bird's nest in my yard.  It's on the ground inside of a fern, next to my house.  I startled the parent bird today as I walked past.  It flew off and chirped angrily at me for a while.  There are at least 4 small blue-ish eggs in the nest.  I hope they can hatch and move on quickly since I'm probably having work done on the house in a few months and don't want to have to postpone it until the babies fly off.  This assumes that the eggs hatch and the babies survive, of course!  I'm not sure what kind of bird it is, but maybe a chickadee or sparrow?  I couldn't see exactly what it was beyond it having black on its head.

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Here's a doily pic to finish off this post:

It's Lavori 11/39, a cute little 22-round doily.  I have no idea who the designer is/was.

Progress report on the current doily

I am more likely to keep this blog alive if I post even when I don't have a completed project to show.  And also if the posts are nattering to myself instead of trying to entertain or edify my imaginary readers.  My guess is that most of my former readers have long moved on to other blogs and forums and what-not.  These days I get more spam comments than real ones.  But that's fine.  I am content to write out my thoughts and post the occasional pic whether or not anyone else cares or sees it.

I am nearing the end of the current doily, yay!  FdA 958 is a 104-round doily and I finished round 94 earlier today.  Ten more rounds to go before I can cast off.  The number of stitches is slowly climbing but it's not too ghastly.  I think I have well under 10,000 stitches remaining though still more than 5000.

It's kind of a cool-looking doily though of course I won't know for sure what I think until it's blocked.  The inner rounds had round-ish flower motifs with crossed stitches and 9-to-5 decreases and other fun stuff.  That's long past.  Now I'm closing up the outer leaf motifs and working on the outer fan motifs.

I wonder what kind of flowers these are meant to be, if indeed they're meant to be anything beyond a stylized floral shape?  They could be fuchsias, maybe.

The above snip is from the FdA photo and shows the innermost hex mesh, the four flower motifs, and the start of the leaf motifs.

I tried above to outline the different areas of the motif into what I think are the different parts of the flower.  The lower part looks like an inner flower or maybe is meant to be stamens or pistils or something.  It ends with k5togs as the crossed stitches of the mid-level get going.  I'm not totally sure, but I think the lines of crossed stitches sort of define three petals or sepals or something.  Then the flower closes with a lot of decreases, with the little elliptical bit above.  The elliptical bit above is outlined in crossed stitches and filled with purls.  I don't know if it's meant to be garter stitch or reverse stockinette, but I chose to twist the twisted stitches and purl the purled stitches on the intermediate rounds.

I am not a botanist and don't feel like looking up the actual names of the flower parts.

Here's a random internet grab of real fuchsia flowers:

There is definitely a resemblance.  I'm not familiar enough with popular ornamental flowers and wildflowers of mid-20th-century Europe to have other ideas about what the flower motifs might represent, if anything.  Also, Niebling did several different fuchsia motifs in doilies over the years.  Dunno if this was one of them, or if he gave semi-random names to his flower doilies, or if the editor did, or what.  Whatever he intended, the motifs in my current doily do look like little stylized flowers of some sort.

All of the flower motifs in this doily are the same except that the little elliptical thing at the top of the outermost flower is one pattern-round shorter than the inner two layers of flower motifs.  I was rather tired of them by that point and was happy to move on to the next part of the doily.

The outer leaves are pretty basic Niebling leaves, found in a lot of his other patterns, and ditto for the outer fans -- a familiar motif from his other patterns.  Even these flowers look a lot like the motifs in the pattern on page 77 of Knitted Lace Designs of Herbert Niebling (edited by Eva Maria Leszner).  In my opinion, the leaf motifs don't look at all like real fuchsia leaves, though.

I feel pretty comfortable about the amount of thread I have left.  Whew.  I'll probably have enough #30 left to do another small doily, especially if I choose something simple.

I'm dreaming of future doilies.  This is a good thing.

Also, I'm having various thoughts about double decreases.  This pattern has a lot of them.  I'm not thinking things through all that seriously, but double decreases can be maneuvered to have different stitches on top, to appear to be right-leaning (K3T), left-leaning (SK2P or SSSK) or vertical (S2KP).  Sometimes it matters which one to choose and sometimes it doesn't.  Charts usually use only one symbol to represent a double-decrease (usually either SK2P or K3T) though I usually consider that to be more of a suggestion than a hard-and-fast requirement.  For this pattern, I chose to keep them all as SK2P even in areas with vertical lines.

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Here's a pic of a doily I knit a long time ago.  It's a cute little thing, a pattern by Christine Duchrow, pattern 64/05.  It's nothing terribly special, but that's perfectly OK.  I enjoyed knitting it and I like how it turned out.

I still need to get some travel projects going.  But I keep picking up the in-progress doily and doing another pair of rounds instead.  At this rate, hopefully I'll be done in another week or so.

The First Doily of Spring 2025 and other blatherings

I started a new doily today.  It's an FdA pattern that doesn't seem to be on Ravelry, not that it matters.  It has a chart and a bit of a description, all in French.  I think the original publication had a text version of the pattern but only rounds 45-59 are preserved in the copy I have.  That's OK -- a chart is easier to work from.

This is almost certainly a Herbert Niebling pattern.  It starts with hex mesh, so there are already rounds that begin and end with yarnovers by round 7.  Soon it starts getting into crossed stitches, k5tog, make-10, and other fun stuff.  Well, I think it's fun.

The motifs are ones I've seen in other Niebling patterns.  In addition to hex mesh that begins and ends with yarnovers, there are a couple of rings of a flower-like motif, and then a leaf motif and some fans.  I've seen all of these motifs in other patterns that are explicitly credited to Niebling.

It's a bit more than 100 rounds.  I'm already somewhere in the 30s, so maybe 1/10 done or so.  I found a full ball of DMC Cebelia #30 in my stash so that's what I'm using.  I should have enough to do the whole doily, I hope.  One never knows, though.

Here's a picture of another doily that I knit with a different ball of DMC Cebelia #30.  This pattern is not much more than 100 rounds, but I used almost all of the thread, yikes!

This is Lavori 11/35.  It's in the Ravelry database as Stern (star) since apparently it was called that in an earlier publication, Neue Mode Sonderheft 5601: Kunststricken.  I used the chart and Italian-language instructions in Lavori 11.

Although this is a pretty doily, it was not as much fun to knit as I had hoped.  For one thing, it has a LOT of stitches per round.  Lots and lots.  Way more than seemed necessary at the time.  That's part of why the doily ended up blocking out so big -- if stitches can't spread out horizontally, they will spread out vertically.  I was kind of sweating by the end, hoping that I'd have enough thread to finish.

Also, I don't know how to describe it, but it seemed kind of blah as I was knitting.  It's well-designed, but, well, it felt ordinary.  No delightful (or aggravating) surprises.  Just elegant leaf motifs and stacked increases and decreases amid plenty of hex mesh.

I don't believe it's a Herbert Niebling design.  It's not attributed to anyone in particular, but it doesn't have the chart quirks that I find characteristic of Niebling's charts.  Yes, doily chart forensics...  In particular, the hex mesh area never starts and ends with a yarnover and no further information.  Instead, the two yarnovers hang out together at the end of the round, and one is given explicit instructions on moving one of those stitches at the end of the intermediate round.  Also, the crochet-ing off is more complex than Niebling usually calls for.

I don't regret making this beautiful design, but I have no desire to knit it again.  I'd love to know who designed it, though, and also what else he/she designed.

Lavori 11 is a fun publication.  I was lucky enough to be able to get it when it was published, and I've never regretted doing so.  It's a mix of patterns by a variety of designers.  I've made at least 9 patterns from it so far and will undoubtedly make more.  A lot of the patterns appear in other publications, often German-language ones such as some of the Sonderheft issues.

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And because I feel like it, and this blog is just for me, I want to dither about doilies for a few paragraphs.

There's another old French-language pattern I'd like to do, but it's text only, no chart.  Also, some of the leftmost abbreviations are cut off in the copy I have.  It's a cute pattern, very Niebling-esque, with typical leaves and flowers and hex mesh.  It looks like it binds a bit in the outer rounds, which deforms the stitches in a way I find attractive.  Also, it has one do a crochet cast-off in the middle, and then pick up stitches and do an outer motif.  It's possible that the motifs wouldn't bind if they were allowed to be round or scalloped instead.

Dunno if it would be a fun experience or not.  I could also chart out the pattern, though that too might or might not be fun.

I'm also considering some of the patterns in Lavori 7.  I've done a few so far, but there are some larger ones that are intriguing.  I'd need to make sure I had enough thread, though.  And enough ambition/stamina if I choose one of the larger designs.

There are some other FdA patterns I'd like to do, too.

I do keep a list of doily patterns I'd like to make, organized in size from smallest to largest.  Some things drop out as my tastes change.  New things get added.  When I'm not seduced by an unexpectedly alluring pattern, I look at my list for inspiration.  I've knit a lot of doilies from that list over the years.

That's enough about doilies for the moment.  Other knitting is occurring but nothing is particularly photogenic or worthy of blogging about yet.

Back to the k5-togs!  The crossed stitches are calling!

Giant wool/mohair frisbee (aka unfelted cat bed) is accepted by the local felines

I finished the cat bed I'd been working on for the past few weeks.  I put it down for a minute and a cat immediately crawled in.   She's all curled up and still sleeping in it.  I guess I'll felt it at some point...

What I did is barely a pattern.  It is based on a lot of free cat bed patterns I found on Ravelry.  I took the basic concepts and ideas and made it work for my yarn with little or no planning involved.

Improv Cat Bed:

Cast on 8 stitches.  Knit 1 round.  Next round:  *K1, m1 (the backwards loop increase), place marker* .  Next: k 1 round.  Next:  *k to marker, m1, slip marker*.  Etc.  Repeat these last two rounds (i.e., increasing 8 stitches every other round) until the bottom is big enough.  Well, for me, it was until I used half my yarn, and I had 25 stitches between markers (200 rounds total), not that it matters.  Then I knit without any more increasing, to make the wall.  When I had about one-quarter of the yarn left, I switched to k2p2 because I was tired of the rolling stockinette.  When I was almost out of yarn, I cast off in knit.

It used almost all of 4 skeins of Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Worsted (85% wool, 15% mohair, single ply).  I used it 2-stranded with the largest needle size I had that came in a long length.  So I guess I knit roughly 375-380 yards (760 yds total).  The yarn is variegated in shades of brown.  It's also some kind of seconds yarn, so there are a few knots and a few less than perfect spots.  For a cat bed, it won't matter at all.

I plan to felt it once I get a chance.  No rush, apparently.  The cats seem content with it as is.

I like how the yarn works up two-stranded.  I wonder if I have enough to make something for me?  A vest, perhaps?  Dunno if there would be enough for sleeves.  This is from a friend's destash -- several colors of Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride, but only 2-4 skeins of each color.  I've used a fair amount of the yarn already but there's still some left.  Heck, maybe it'll mostly get turned into cat beds.

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I think I've decided on my next doily.  It is an FdA pattern and has every indication of being a Herbert Niebling design.  It uses motifs that are used in some of his other patterns and has that very characteristic thing of rounds beginning and ending with yarnovers.  It's a bit more than 100 rounds.

I'm also thinking about doing one of the doilies from Lavori 7 if I have enough thread in the stash.  I could always order more, of course.  Or do Gloxiniaeflora and then the Lavori 7 doily.  I'm pretty sure the Lavori 7 doilies I'm considering are Niebling designs -- they have things like familiar-looking flower motifs and lots of big decreases and crossed stitches and hex mesh, and charts with pattern motifs that start and end with yarnovers.

I do seem to have a thing for Niebling's designs.  Not on purpose -- I'm not a snob.  But there's something about the way he designs and the fun of knitting his patterns that I enjoy.  Not all of his patterns, though.  Some are annoying or entirely too weird.  I do enjoy other designers' patterns, too!  Many talented people have come up with gorgeous and fun designs.

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I also need to start a few more knitting projects.  I have a couple of shawls started.  One is a potential travel knitting project -- one of those sideways-knit asymmetric triangles.  I'm doing it out of one of those long-variegation sock yarns.  It's mostly garter stitch with faggoting/lace stripes every now and then, quite similar to shawls I've done in the past.

The other is a lace design by Sharon Miller.  I have to remember what the chart quirk was since I don't seem to have written it down.  I'll probably remember the next time I pick it up.  But will I remember to write it down this time?  Who knows?  In any case, although it is pretty straightforward, it won't lend itself to travel knitting.

Both of the above have been sitting for a while.  So it's possible one or both will be unraveled and I'll try something else.  Plus there's the next use-up-small-bits-of-handspun project to plan out and start.

I want to make a sweater for myself, too, since it's been a while.  I keep starting and then abandoning different things for various reasons.  Something will stick eventually.

And then there are always the quickie hats, mittens, cowls, and socks.

I'm probably going to start another spinning project soon, too.  I keep dithering about what to spin first, so nothing has gotten started at all.

Précieuse Dentelle post-blocking pics and another bonus doily pic (Viola)

Here's the bad post-blocking pic.  It's cute, in spite of the aggravation and all my mistakes and not terribly careful blocking. 

Here's a close-up of the hex-mesh-substitute texture stitches.

The upper part of the photo shows where I was doing slip 2, knit 2, pass the 2 slipped stitches over, which were done over the double yarnover of the previous round.  (Actually, the double yarnover plus 1 of the 2 stitches of the s2-k2-p2sso couplets of the previous round.)

The lower part of the photo shows the other texture stitch, in the columns inside the petal/leaf/whatever motifs.  For this, one round has a double yarnover between two double-decreases (A OO A).  Above it, on the next round, is a k-tbl, yo, crossed-stitch, yo, ktbl.

Was it worth the hassle?  Eh.

I'm still glad I knit this, since it's been on my list for years.  What can I say? I'm attracted to a certain kind of oddball doily.  I can check it off my list and move on to the next doily that intrigues me.

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Here's a pic of the Viola doily, knit many years ago.  I don't know if I've talked about this on this blog.  It's from Kunstbreien B39, pattern No. 5905.

There are charts for square and oval doilies using this motif, but I preferred the round one.  I did this one after the tulip doily in Leszner (which does have a pic on this blog from way back when), so it was not my first time wrapping stitches.

I do like the textural contrasts -- crossed stitches, wrapped stitches, columns of double yarnovers, and so on.  As I wrote earlier, the individual flowers in the Lavendel doily are this little motif.  There are many more of these flowers in the Lavendel doily than in this one, of course.  And Niebling used this flower motif in other doily patterns, too.  The Viola doily is small but it was educational and interesting to knit.  I enjoyed knitting it.  Or at least I don't remember not enjoying it, and I know I must have been very impressed with myself given the lessons it taught me.

I'm not really doing doily dithering about the Next Doily, but I'm not not dithering.  I can't do much until I see what's in the thread stash and estimate how far I expect each batch will go.  Much of the current thread stash consists of thrift store finds of vintage thread, mostly purchased as single balls and often as partial rather than full balls.  I have found, though, that the thread color (white and off-white, mostly) is surprisingly consistent over the years.

Also, I have other things I want to do.  Doilies may have to wait their turn.

Waiting to dry

Précieuse Dentelle is done, yay!  I pinned it out on a box and it's drying.  I'll have better pics next time, once it's dry and I can put it on something more suitable to take the usual uninspired mug shot (aka bad pic).  The pic is from a slight angle so the doily looks somewhat elliptical.  Plus I didn't take great care to block it perfectly.

It's a perfectly nice doily.  I made a zillion mistakes and oopsies while knitting it, which were fixed or kludged to varying degrees.  That was humbling.  I even dropped stitches while doing the crochet cast off, something I've not done in a long time.

I did run out of thread in round 71 (the entire doily is 72 rounds plus the cast-off).  Luckily, very luckily, I found a partial ball of thread that seems to match.  I'm pretty sure it really is the same thing, Fincrochet 20, from a previous pattern I knit a while back.  Whew, that I hadn't already used the leftovers for something else.

In round 69, there's a number in a box that sure looked like a 3 (kpk in stitch).  But no, it's a 5.  And I didn't discover this until round 71.  Sigh.  I took out the intermediate round and then, as I reknitted round 70, fixed it on the fly.  The spot in the chart is on a crease and rather hard to read -- I'm still not sure if it's a chart error or simply indistinct and thus easily mis-read.

And so on.  It's not been a tranquil knitting experience.

But it is now done, and looks acceptable.

What next?  Maybe Gloxiniaeflora, from Kunstbreien B39.  I've loved this pattern for many years.  So maybe it's time to knit it?  I need to make sure I have enough thread before I try, though.  It's 167 rounds or so.

I've knit several patterns from this Kunstbreien -- it was one of the first sets of charts shared with me through the Doily Underground, long long ago.  It was much photocopied and re-photocopied, back in the day when the technology wasn't that great and copying/mailing costs were a factor, and thus only the basics were shared and they are somewhat hard to read in places.  I've knit 5 (I think) doilies from this publication, though for some, I used charts or written descriptions from other sources (such as Gloria Penning's pattern collections).  After this one, there are maybe one or two more in Kunstbreien 39 that intrigue me, but who knows?  There are already way too many doily patterns on my want-to-do list, more than I'll probably ever be able to knit.  Alas.  Though I can dream, and the potential makes me happy.

Here's something I don't think I've shared before, that I knit from Kunstbreien:

It is Filices (pattern Nr 5913).  It is 80 rounds (plus cast-off), 11 pattern repeats per round.  There are a few chart errors, but the pattern is so symmetric that they were easy to spot and fix.

Filices is a reference to ferns.  The doily was straightforward and enjoyable to knit.  I liked the symmetry and the way the motif was in strict wedges that didn't really interact with the other pattern repeats.  It might well be a Herbert Niebling pattern, but whether or not it is, it is well designed and attractive.

I enjoyed using the DMC Cordonnet #40.  Although I'll knit with #20 if that's what I have, I've really started preferring finer and finer threads.

The other patterns I've knit from Kunstbreien B39?  In no particular order, Clematis, Adonis, Convallaria, and Viola (the round one of the set).

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My cat bed is almost finished.  I've switched to k2p2 ribbing, because why not?  Well, hopefully it'll help with the shaping once I start felting this beast -- either keeping the sides from curling or flopping and/or making it easier to fold over the edge.  Dunno.  Anyway, my guess is that I have maybe another half-dozen or so rounds before it's time to cast off.

I'm thinking about what travel knitting project I want to do next.  I recently finished yet another dishcloth shawl, a large and cozy worsted-weight alpaca in variegated shades of blue and green and purple.  So what next?  I have several hundred yards of gray Romney handspun that I might want to deal with.  Blobs of it were dyed different colors and either spun as a 2-ply or plied with a ply of undyed gray to make a barberpole yarn.  So maybe a half-hap (i.e. a hap shawl, but triangular rather than square).  I could do the Sarah Bradberry feather-and-fan shawl pattern again, since that's a perfectly respectable pattern recipe in the half-hap tradition.  I've already made one to use up some small batches of hand-dyed Beast yarn, many years ago.  I'd really like to do a full hap at some point, but that would require more planning.  Someday.

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And just because I have vague plans for doilies, shawls, or anything else doesn't mean they'll actually happen.  I'm easily distracted.

Mistakes, oddities, patience, and other musings

Précieuse Dentelle is slowly growing.  I'm making a lot of mistakes, sigh.  When I'm tired, it's easy enough to misinterpret a symbol, to forget a quirk.  Some of them are easy to fix.  Others are easy-ish -- I can get the stitch count correct, but will the discrepancy look OK when the doily is done?  I hope so, because it's kind of an annoying doily at the moment and I don't want to take it out and start it yet again.  If I make some kind of huge mistake, though, I'll have to decide whether to try again or abandon the pattern.

I'm pretty sure I'll be running out of thread.  Apparently, 20g of #20 cotton (172m) is not sufficient for a 72-round doily.  I probably did know that at some point, but it's been a while since I've done a lot of doily knitting with #20 thread, and when I do, I tend to use 50g balls and their much higher yardage (meterage?).

Again, I'm not loving this doily.  I think I have some leftovers from other projects that will be sufficiently compatible, so I'll make do if and when the time comes.  I've done more than half the rounds, but I'm probably not at the halfway point yet for the knitting.

This doily uses some unusual stitches that I've not seen in other doily patterns.  I've already written about them -- ladders that alternate a round of double yarnovers with a round of crossed stitches, and a background motif that consists of double yarnovers separated by a 4-to-2 stitch decrease.  (By the way, for the second set of ladder motifs, I'm doing k3tog on the left and sk2p on the right.)

OK, I'm slow on the uptake.  Well, not too slow, because I knew this already, but trudging through the stitches gives me time to think about it.  Both of these are hex-mesh alternatives.  They both give the honeycomb-like structure of the more common hex-mesh that Niebling uses (\OO/ and O/\O)) but use different methods to create the network.

I've kind of gotten used to the ladders (and I'm almost done with them, yay!), but the background mesh is still fairly tedious.  Slip 2 stitches, knit 2 stitches, pass the slipped stitches over the knitted stitches, double-yarnover.  Hopefully I'll get better at them, and hopefully I won't drop anything too important while slipping stitches and passing them over the knitting stitches.  Except for the stitches that are supposed to be dropped, of course.  It's a lot slower than the more common \OO/ hex-mesh pattern and I have to work carefully and pay attention.

Why, though?  Was this some kind of experiment?  A joke?  A variation on something else?  I will have to look through my collection of patterns, but I don't know if I've seen these texture patterns in any other doily, by any other named designer.  Is this a Herbert Niebling pattern, or was it by someone else who was riffing on some of his design characteristics?

Hopefully my kludges will be sufficiently unobtrusive by the time the doily is finished and blocked.

Because pics are fun, here's a pic of a different doily:

Way back when I last nattered on about doilies, I mentioned that I'd be doing Burda 418/33, and that there would be pictures.  Well, here's the picture!

It's part of a set.  I knit 418/31 and 418/32 (the square and the hexagon) earlier, and this is the octagon of the set.  It's an attributed Herbert Niebling pattern.  I knit it in 2014, yikes!  Where does the time go?

I don't remember much about knitting it, except that it brings a smile to my face when I look at it along with a memory of "fun", whatever that might mean.

Here's a pic of 418/32:

and 418/31:

Wow, apparently I knit those in 2004.  That's rather a while ago.  Apparently there are a few more versions of this pattern that were published in Beyer 7014 (and perhaps elsewhere) -- a smaller octagon and a larger hexagon (that can be blocked as an oval).  Maybe someday I'll crank those out, too.

If/when I get through Précieuse Dentelle, I'll try to choose something a whole lot less aggravating for my next doily.  It doesn't need to be quite as straightforward as the Round Lace Mat I just did, not unless the pattern I choose just happens to be that simple.  But it will be a pattern without any of those sl2, k2, p2sso maneuvers.

Précieuse Dentelle and other topics

In my last post, I wrote about possibly re-starting a doily I had tried a few years ago.  I had abandoned that attempt for various reasons mostly having to do with me making mistakes in areas that were difficult to recover from.

I've started it.  This time, I'm using some #20 cotton.  Hopefully I have enough, because I'd rather not rip and re-do too many more times.  There are 72 rounds total, and as you can see from the pic, 6 pattern repeats per round (12 in the outermost rounds).

It's kind of a weird-looking doily, which is part of why I wanted to knit it.  I'm a sucker for certain types of zoomy-looking doilies.  Here's a pic from the pattern copy I have (this is not my own version of the doily, which is currently a wad of thread on my needles):

The background mesh in the middle section consists of alternating double yarnovers and a stitch pattern that is slip 2, knit 2, pass the slipped stitches over.  That has to be done carefully or the slipped stitches will slip over and off the needles, with chaos ensuing all around.

The ladder-like textures inside the flower-like inner motif are also a bit unusual.  They alternate a pattern round of double yarnovers and a pattern round of crossed stitches.  The ladders alternate, so that the double-yarnover round of one ladder happens at the same pattern round as the crossed-stitch round of the ladder next to it.

The outermost fans/scallops seem relatively sedate and normal, but I'll reserve judgment until I get to them.

Anyway...  I've cast on and am making progress.  The fun starts very quickly -- crossed stitches and double yarnovers and double decreases and twisted stitches -- so it's slow going.

This is likely to be a Herbert Niebling pattern, since this kind of textural contrast is pretty typical for him.  Plus there are k7-togs.

As I wrote before, the pattern is in French, though luckily charted.  No designer is listed, as far as I can tell, though maybe it was elsewhere and not in the sections that were preserved on the 'net.  The source was published in Belgium, but there's no info in my copy about the name of the publication.  My guess is FdA (Femmes d'Aujourd'hui) since the chart style and the yellowing paper seems similar to other patterns known to be from old FdA issues, and since FdA is/was published in Belgium.  But I honestly do not know.  My source is also unknown -- I found it online a very long time ago and either don't have a record of where I found it (though it was a French-language site, I remember that) and/or the site no longer exists.

The doily looks vaguely familiar but I can't figure out if I have a version of this in some other publication.

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One of my other in-progress knitting projects is a cat bed.  It's being knit from two strands of Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Worsted and will be felted when finished.  I looked at a lot of the free and not-free patterns on Ravelry and am winging it rather than following an actual pattern.

I cast on 8.  I increased 8 stitches every other round (using the backwards loop increase) until I'd used half the yarn.  Conveniently for my slightly OCD mind, this was when I had 200 stitches on the needles (8 sections of 25 stitches each).  Now I'm knitting those stitches without any more increases to make a bit of a rise or wall for the cat bed.  When I get close to done, I'll do a few rounds of ribbing or seed stitch or garter stitch, maybe, and then cast off.  Then we'll see how well I can felt it, if I can get it shaped to what shape I want it to be (if I decide I care), and then see what the cats think about it.

The yarn is from a friend's destash.  I have 4 skeins, not quite enough to make something like a sweater for me.  Also, the skeins are seconds, meaning that the quality isn't perfect and it's possible the yardage is a bit short.  It seems like about the right amount for this cat bed.  The radius was about 11" (diameter 22-23") when I stopped increasing.  My estimate is that the walls will be roughly 5" high.  There will be 400 yards of knitting (800 total, but I'm knitting 2-stranded).

I finished a Monmouth cap recently and it too is awaiting felting.  I'll talk about the hat in a future post, maybe.

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I haven't started dithering yet about The Next Doily.  I'm still at the stage where I'm simply pleased I'm knitting doilies again.  Also, I'm dithering about the next tablet-woven band and don't want to be too distracted from that.  (Actually, I think I've mostly figured that out and will be warping it up and starting soon.)  Plus I need a new travel project since I finished the giant dishcloth shawl that had kept me occupied for the last several months.  Doily Dithering will have to wait its turn.