I'm still learning about netting from my grandmother

My grandmother, the one who taught me to net, died over 30 years ago.  However, she is still teaching me new ideas in netting.

Several years after her death, I asked one of my aunts, who still had many of her doilies, if she would be willing to take the doilies and photocopy them on a black background.  She did.  I filed those photocopies, since I did not have the time then to read all the patterns off the photocopies, write them down, and make them.  Over the years I have pulled them out and created the doilies when I've needed to make a doily for one of my many nieces and nephews as they got married.

A couple of weeks ago I realized that I did not have any doilies already made that used one of my grandmother's patterns and that there was a nephew getting married shortly.  So I pulled out the rough draft approximation of the instructions of one of Grandmother's doilies.  The photo included with the instructions looked like this.

I started making the doily, correcting the instructions as I went.  It was not until I reached the end of the split stitches that I realized they were supposed to be centered under the break between the increase stitches, not under the increase stitches, where I had placed them.

If it had been one of my patterns, I would have just continued and given the new pattern a different name.  However, since this present to my nephew and his wife was to be a copy of one of my grandmother's doilies, I could not do that.

I had two choices.  I could begin again and do it correctly, or I could cut off all the split stitches I had done and start again two rows after the increase stitch.




I cut off the mistake.


Now I need to decide what to do with 2 yards of cast-off netting; throw it away or attach it to something.







It took me an extra day to finish the doily, but it followed her pattern.

And what did she teach me?  Well, the stitch between the center and the split stitch is either a new stitch that I have to name,

or a combination of a decrease stitch and an increase stitch that I had never seen her put together before.

I also had to figure out a way to end the split stitches so that the proper stitch would be skipped in the next round.


I'm not sure how Grandmother did it, but I figured out one way to do it.