Wow, I can't believe it's been ten years since I published anything on this blog! I kept meaning to, but Life got in the way. Cross-country moves. New interests. So many other Real Life things. No ambition to organize a post. Plus I am still a lousy photographer.
Cell phone cameras are helping with the lousy photographer problem.
I still knit doilies as well as lots of other things.
Here's a photo of a doily I knit a while back. It's still a terrible photo, but what the heck, I'll share it anyway.
It's Lavendel, a Niebling pattern from Erikas 79. It has 6 pattern repeats per round and 184 rounds (plus the crochet cast-off).
This was a lot of fun to knit, though by the end, I was VERY ready to be done with it. I'm still working on the stamina for larger doily projects.
The thread is some vintage stuff I found in a craft-recycle store. At the time, it was getting harder and harder to find nice-quality fine threads for knitting doilies, especially in person in the local stores. Heck, it's still nearly impossible -- I'm mostly using mail order for fine, tightly-twisted, high-quality thread even though I would love to support local places. So... at the time when I got this thread, I was going through thrift stores and craft-recycling stores and buying out any reasonable and affordable fine threads I could find. If it was #30 or finer, and there was enough for a decent-sized project, it came home with me.
Anyway, the vintage thread is Clarks Big Ball 3-cord crochet #30. I found several balls at various times/places. Dye lot? Who knows! Age? Who knows! Mid to late 20th century, I assume.
Although I'm really loving #40 and finer, I will still knit doilies with #30.
Luckily this vintage stuff really doesn't have much of a dyelot. There is no sign of where one ball of thread ran out and the next began. I'm not going to question my good luck. The thread itself is kind of mediocre, but it was good enough to be worth knitting a doily with.
I love the flower clusters of this pattern -- it's the flower from Niebling's Viola doily (that I did a long time ago), but repeated to be a full bouquet. I mean, in the middle of doing wrap stitches along with crossed stitches and big-honking-decreases and all the other fun, I was questioning some of my life choices, but the results are so worthwhile. I love the crossed stitches, the honeycomb mesh, the leaves, the asymmetry, and even the distortions in the fabric and how they serve the design.
It was tricky to block since it was larger than my largest blocking surface, and it was large enough that I had difficulty finding open floor/bed/etc. space for pinning it out. It's slightly elliptical as a result.
This was finished a few years ago, and I don't think I've finished a doily since. The next one I tried had a tricky background stitch, and after I screwed it up the third time, I decided that Fate was telling me something. Then I got distracted by something else entirely, and I have not yet returned to the fine needles and threads and weird foreign-language obscurely-charted doily patterns that I seem to love so much.
I have a couple of small and simple doilies on my to-do list to get my doily-knitting mojo back. Lavendel itself was the last doily in my previous doily-knitting binge. Hopefully I can keep blogging here and go through some (or all) of the doilies I've knit since the last time I posted doily pics on this blog.
Much other knitting has occurred -- shawls, hats, sweaters, mittens, etc. Hmm, no socks in the past few years; I need to get my sock-knitting mojo back, too. I've done a lot of spinning. Some sewing and crocheting. A fair amount of narrow wares -- inkle weaving, tablet weaving, braiding, fingerloop braiding, and so on. Other things that aren't fiber-related at all.
Hopefully I will keep this blog going for a while again. I have many years of doilies and other knitting to document and natter on about! Well, until the blog goes silent again. Hopefully it won't be forever, and hopefully it won't even be ten years.
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