What I See

This is what I saw:Six little flowers, blossoms towards the center of the snowflake.

I have to say, I don't think I've ever run across a pattern where the flowers (if they were meant to be flowers) were knitted from the flowerhead down to the leaves.

I broke down and ordered the other Marie Niedner book, Knitted Lace (Kunst-Stricken), and Volume I and Volume II of the Christine Duchrow patterns, and spent the weekend after they showed up entering the patterns into a spreadsheet.

My spreadsheets usually have the page number the pattern photo is on, the German title, a rough translation, and the page number of the chart. I print them out and write notes on them, like how many rounds in a doily, or how many stitches wide an insertion is.

But their main purpose is to pick out potential projects - one of my main notes is "pretty!"

I received a question about blocking this doily, and how I cast off to make the edge so smooth.

First off, the pattern ends with a series of yarnovers alternating with single or double decreases. That is, it ends with a nice round of holes, handy for running a nylon blocking cord through.

I followed the cast-off I learned in one of Galina Khmeleva's workshops (purl, wrapping the yarn backwards, put the new stitch back on the left needle, then purl 2 together, continuing to wrap the yarn backwards). This makes the cast-off stitches curl over to the back of the work.I am a very tight knitter, so in order to cast off loosely, I used a much larger (much much larger: a US 8, 5 mm, when this was knitted on a US 2, 2.75mm) needle to do all this purling.

I used a needle to run thin nylon crochet cord through all the holes, eased it out until I liked the looks of it, then tensioned it with 12 rustproof pins. I used nylon cord before, and although it doesn't look right for every pattern, I was really happy with how it worked for this one.