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.