I Did Not Knit This Doily

I bought it at an antique store for four dollars. While I was happy to pay so little, at the same time it emphasizes how undervalued lace knitting is.

A quilt, especially an antique, might be up for hundreds or thousands of dollars, and it wasn't that long ago that you'd find quilts in estate sales. Gradually the work and the fascination of making them raised the value of the quilt as an art form. I'm ready for knitted lace to reach that level, even if it would raise the price out of my reach.

I don't believe this particular doily is "antique" (more than 100 years old) anyway. Even "vintage" might be pushing it. To me, it feels relatively new. It probably landed in the antique store booth because (argh) "Nobody does that kind of work any more. It's a (ARGH!) lost art."

If the "lost art" part was true, rarity should make lace more valuable.

Let's move on to something that doesn't make me so mad.

I Knitted These Socks

My husband looked at this sock heel and said, "That just looks wrong."

That didn't make me mad, it made me laugh.

The rose heather yarn on the heel shows exactly where I steal stitches from the instep to make the heel deeper. Then I knitted the first row of ribbing increasing on the front, decreasing on the back, so the cuff angles forward. It does look wrong.

But looks aren't everything - it fits the sticky-outy part of my heel perfectly. In fact, it fits so nicely I might have to make this a permanent part of my personal sock formula.

The shaded yarn on the cuff is, yes, [delicate shudder] acrylic. Red Heart, um, Collage, I think, in Landscape Green. Landscape Green is a sort of green pea soup color, plied with a second strand that shades through gray to cream to rose. I didn't think the two-ply would stand up to being a sock foot, so it's only on the top of the foot and the cuff.

Yes, I know it's plastic. So let's move on to the new yarn store that's fairly close to me, Needle in a Haystack down in South Haven.

It's a small store and a new store. The selection is somewhat limited. But they have sock yarn! And of course, for someone who wants to smoosh yarn, the internet is no substitute for a yarn store.

So maybe I should end this post with:

I Bought This Yarn

A couple of skeins of Cascade Heritage, colors 5608 and 5614, 75% superwash merino and 25% nylon (plastic!).

The superwash merino makes this yarn so soft, I was petting it all the way home.

And now I find myself thinking about gloves. This is a nice thin yarn, so I could make glove fingers that didn't stand up by themselves. It's thin enough, there could even be some double-knitting going on . . . hmmmmm.