Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Two Different Net Doilies

I have been slowly working on one of the beautiful patterns I received from Herman Mangels. It has taken a bit of time since there are about 9,200 knots. But I finished it on Saturday and starched it yesterday. This one was designed by Martha Kupfermann. She called it Large Aster (well, that's an English translation of the German). It measures about 23 inches in diameter; the instructions said about 67 cm. It is hard to measure precisely since the edge is scalloped.




On a much smaller note (10.25 inch diameter) is the doily I made just before starting Large Aster. I was planning on re-making one called Ice Crystal. I thought I had followed the directions carefully for each round, so I was puzzled when, on round nine, I noticed that I had more loops than I was supposed to have -- twice as many.

Looking at the doily in one hand and the instructions in the other, I soon discovered my problem. On round four I was supposed to net 2 knots in a loop and then skip a loop around the doily. I had forgotten to skip the loops. No wonder I had more loops than I was supposed to have.

When faced with the decision of either undoing all the knots from round five to round nine, cutting off rounds five through nine, or creating a new doily pattern, I chose to create a new pattern.

It looked like a sunflower to me, but I already have a doily pattern named Sunflower. I decided to call it Helianthus.



In the process of designing this doily, I ended up with a new decorative stitch which I called Flame.
Oh, I forgot to add one other thing that made me decide to create a new doily. I only had a limited amount of thread. I had chosen Ice Crystal because it used only a small amount of thread. The amount of thread also influenced my decision to try a new stitch, which eventually became Flame, instead of keeping all the extra loops and doing a different edge. I ended the doily with about a yard of thread left.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just beautiful, Rita! I recognize the large doily as the one you were working on at SNB last week. It will be a much appreciated wedding gift, I'm sure. I'm impressed by your resourcefulness on the smaller one, although I'd imagine that last round was a wee bit stressful as you looked at the number of loops left and the amount of string left! ;)

Alwen said...

I did a demo at the Michigan Fiber Festival today, but the only netting I brought was a bag full of tatting stuff.

However, I met a woman who was so excited to see any netting at all. She described some doilies her grandmother had netted that she had, and I wrote down "Knots indeed" for her to Google you.

I'll be she will be really excited if she happens to find your blog while these doilies are right on the top!

the boogeyman's wife said...

those look so cool, especially the aster. good thing you could save the second doily and still had enough thread!

Anonymous said...

Oh those are lovely! Congratulations!

Hannah