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.

------------------

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.