On Following Directions

As I was looking for something else to knit the other day, I went paging through Andrea Kunststricken Sonderheft, 0802, and I noticed that three of the charts in it were Christine Duchrow charts.

They're very distinctive charts, with their rs for knit stitches (from the German rechts) and IIs for yarnovers.

I hunted through my Christine Duchrow books until I found all three.

Duchrow 81.5:
Duchrow 81.8:
And Duchrow 73.5:But what was the matter with the knitted example in the photo?

The original 73.5 photo showed two large holes at the end of each flower petal, and a border of lacy little holes.

I had to knit and find out.

This pattern has not one, not two, but eight notes relating to different chart lines. Some are obvious things like knitting three plain rows following a pattern row. Others are a lit-tle more involved.

The points of the petals are formed by knitting 16 stitches alternating with 15 triple yarnovers in one row, then in the next row, dropping those yarnovers, elongating the 16 stitches, and knitting all 16 together into one stitch!

Just to make that whole process more fun, before and after the whole dropping-a-triple-yarnover process, you also make two new triple yarnovers before and after the petal point to form the two large holes. Wow.Creating the lacy border involves moving the start of the round by one stitch in three different rows. If you skip those moves, you end up with the laddered border in the Andrea photo.

If you follow the directions, you get the lacy holes that match the original photo. So important sometimes, following directions!

Doily with Sharp Pointy Teef!

Well, this is verrry interesting!Here is the original photo of Figure 78, a blobby center and rather snowflake-like points.

I used nylon crochet cord and twelve pins to block it out to a similar six-pointed star shape.

And that's when I saw it! Do you see it?Or am I imagining them?

So I Finished Figure 72

...and went straight on to Figure 78, Sechseckiges Deckchen mit tiefen Zacken (hexagonal doily with sharp teeth).
This one is all nice and organized in the center, and gets a little strange towards the edges. I'll be interested to see how it blocks out.

Once again, I found the chart was cut along the left side and pasted back together missing some stitches. In this case, the first part of the chart was shown twice, and the second part was symmetrical, so I think I have it worked out.

It's like codebreaking, especially since the original instructions are not only in German, which I never studied, but also in the lovely and confusing fraktur.

A complete puzzle from start to finish - I guess only my fellow puzzle fanatics can quite understand the fascination and the satisfaction of wrestling it into submission.

I've gone and ordered the other two Christine Duchrow books published by Lacis, and their somewhat abridged version of Kunst-Stricken. It was the devil to try and find used copies of these books that are still in print and on offer from the publisher - apparently while I wasn't looking, the used book market fell on its head and forgot that "used copy" was supposed to mean "cheaper copy".

One of the great delights of the early internet for me was the sudden access to used book markets. Instead of contracting with a book-finding service, I could go to AbeBooks or BookFinder and poof! find a copy of a great out-of-print book for half the price or less of new.

Now it looks like some of the used booksellers aren't doing their own research and checking for in-print status and new-from-the-publisher price, especially not for niche things like reprints from small publishers like Lacis.

Instead they're checking Amazon, seeing a price of $36, and pricing their copy at $36. Meanwhile, the new price is $22. hmph!

My Historic Doily Kick

Lately my obsession has been knitting a lot of fairly old doily patterns.

I downloaded a knitting chart font with characters like the charts my Niebling patterns use, and I've been making charts from things like the written instructions in my 1909 copy of de Dillmont's Encyclopedia of Needlework.

Although I know better, I loved this blue-shaded crochet cotton so much that I knitted the de Dillmont doily out of it.I hoped the soft blues would blend better - instead they settled stubbornly into same-color pools.

Another doily I recharted was this one, Duchrow 61.5.I used a ball of vintage thread that turned out to have both white and cream/ecru wound over the same ball. I want to tea-dye this thing to soften that white ring, and then I'll re-block it.

This week I've been working on pattern 72 from the knitted lace section of Das Stricken, as reprinted in Lacis' Knitted Lace II (Kunst-Stricken II).It's a very pretty little thing - the plate from the original hardly does it justice.

Unfortunately the chart in the Lacis book was cut vertically, and starting at Row 28, is missing three stitches from each row.

Fortunately, when I recharted this, I lined up motifs the way the Niebling charts do, and those missing stitches turned that section to instant static.

And after messing about with it a bit, I realized that also starting at Row 28, there were two repeats per row, so all I had to do was work out where the first one ended and knit it again.

We haven't had the severe weather much of the midwest has been suffering, but it's been raining plenty, so I've had lots of time indoors this week to knit!

the Broad Arrow, and the Diamond

Preserved for 355 years in the wonderful medium of print, I now present to you

the Broad Arrow, and the Diamond

I knew that I still didn't have that fifth row quite right. This morning one of those rays of light hit me . . . what if the instructions were wrong in this certain particular way . . .?

HA!

By Hannah, I think I've got it!

(Rita, I've sent you an email to the pattern source.)

Intermittent Net

What a week!

I've been struggling with an intermittent internet connection (and a cold) most of last week.

So let me do a quick summing-up.

First off, the robin and her nest. We had cold frosty weather much of last week, but by the weekend, she was feeding babies.

I tried and tried to catch her on the nest feeding them, but one baby craning its head up was the best I could get:

And then seconds after I got that picture, two more popped their wobbly little heads up:

It must be spring in Michigan, because while I was lurking at the window trying to take robin photos, a pair of mourning doves and their baby landed on the garden wall:I see mourning doves all the time, but I think this is the first time I've seen one so young.

Ruth in the bath looks like something you might find in a tide pool:

My first pinning attempt used a lot of pins, all my rustproof florist pins, and I still wasn't quite happy with it.This little doily reminds me so much of some of the Niebling designs, where he totally ignores the "increase by X per round per needle to create Y shape" and just blithely creates beautiful floral shapes. Your rigid one-at-the-end-of-each-needle, like Winde, you will not find in Ruth!

I tried a second time to pin out Ruth, this time stringing a nylon thread through the outer round, tying it, and pinning inside the cord.I still used almost all my pins, but I like the smoother sides of the square better.

I found two errors in the chart near the end, detailed in my Ravelry project notes.

Let's see, what else?

I don't have a new photo of the swirl doily, but I soaked it in water and washing soda, rinsed it multiple times, and dried it out in yesterday's sun. That stain lightened considerably, hooray!

Yesterday I went to a local estate sale, and came home with this haul:Several nice sets of dpns, a copy of Emma Brockstedt's 1916 Practical Tatting Book No. 1, a couple sets of straight needles, multiple nylon circular needles, and something new to me called a "condo needle", with a large end and a small end, all for six dollars.

All things taken together, a good week, especially as I shake this cold.

Now to see if I can get this to post!

Creative Avoidance

Creative avoidance. That's when I'm nearly finished with something, and instead of actually finishing it, I start something else.

I found a doily I really liked in my new book, Knitted Lace II (Kunst-Stricken II):Coincidentally, my great-grandmother's name was Ruth, and her family was German.

It's square and small, only 49 rows. I cast on last night and started knitting. I'm up to row 30-something.

The octopus helps me keep the book open to the chart.It likes the doily because it is on eight 00 needles.

I found this swirl-pattern doily at an estate sale the other day. I soaked most of the yellow out of it, but it has one reddish-brown stain that didn't lighten much. If we get some sun, I might try sun-bleaching it. That works really well on tomato stains, but it doesn't do much versus tea or coffee. I couldn't find an exact match on Ravelry. The edging is a separate garter-stitch lace that has been sewn on.

Anyone recognize it?

Did You Hear That?

A loud squee! noise coming out of Michigan?
Ordinarily that would be me, coming home Kathy Kirchner's trunk show at the West Michigan Lace Group meeting with a copy of Knitted Lace 2 (Kunst-Stricken II), a hot pink tatting shuttle, and my usual haul of Valdani thread.

(And yes, my mom did send me home with another bottomed-out chair. I swear right here in public that I will finish this one in months instead of years.)

But the squee ended up being over this:

Look! Do you see what I see? To me it looked so familiar!
It's the Gertrud Woywod pattern I knitted from the back of The Knitted Lace Patterns of Christine Duchow Vol 3
.

There can't, there can not be two Gertruds who came up with this exact pattern. Gertrud Woywod must be Gertrud Villforth. (The Lacis book says “Billforth”, a mistake due to the confusing German fraktur alphabet on the cover. German sources say Villforth.)

And if you were intrigued by the flower edging, but put off by the handwritten chart, there it is all charted out in neat symbols, with a matching insertion. Sweeeeeeet!

Now I must go page through the back of the Duchrow book some more and see if I can find any more of these in Kunst-Stricken II.

Little Scraps of Lace

Somewhat magnified. Okay, greatly magnified - the ruler is in inches.The needle is an Inox 4-0 dpn, 1.25mm, and the thread is DMC 80 Spécial Dentelles.

This is "Point Lace Edging" from Eléonore Riego de la Branchardière's 1846 Knitting, Crochet, and Netting.

I love Google Books, and I have scads of the 19th century knitting and netting books bookmarked in my library.

I have a bunch of these downloaded to my hard drive, and then I have a smaller subset that I've printed out chunks of, mostly the knitting and netting and some of the tatting patterns, to try "someday", that mythical day when I'll have everything else done and read and I can devote to the someday things.

Then the new Knitty came out, and there it was! Point Lace Edging not only knitted by Franklin Habit of the Panopticon, but graphed out.

And there was the error that had stumped me, in the 11th row, where suddenly it called for more stitches than I had, and I had given up.

Riego's 11th row says "Knit 2, (make 1, knit 2 together, make 1, knit 2 together, knit 1, knit 2 together, make 1, knit 1, twice,) knit 2 together, knit 2." (Her make 1 is what I would call a yarnover.)

There it is, that opening parenthesis! It's in the wrong spot. And Franklin had corrected it!

The row should say "Knit 2, make 1, knit 2 together, (make 1, knit 2 together, knit 1, knit 2 together, make 1, knit 1, twice,) knit 2 together, knit 2."

I think these are just the cutest little knitted spots in the history of the wuuurrrrrld.

A Sampler Post

Sort of like those candy boxes that have all different things in them.

In no particular order:
For Roxie, our mini soapstone stove with a coffee mug for scale. The curved metal skirt in the front is about 14-1/2 inches (37 cm) wide, and it's 17 inches (43 cm) tall.

No, I don't plan on leaving my mug in front of it, but I'll bet the soapstone top will work just as well as one of those electric mug-warmers.

The weather has warmed back up a bit, so I won't be able to try it as a mug warmer until it cools back off outside.

I saw a hummingbird on some of the New England asters, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae, that I rescued from the bulldozers a couple of years back, but I was too slow to get her photo this time. We had a really dry year in 2007 and I lost a lot of the plants I moved. The survivors are thriving this year, which was much wetter.

Yesterday I was thrilled to see a volunteer plant blooming down by the neighbor's drainage trench. They always remind me of the magician's bouquet that he pulls out of his sleeve.

On the non-knitting front, the Vale of York Viking hoard is going to be on display at the Yorkshire Museum from 18 September to 1 November this year. I particularly love the silver-gilt cup. This is the hoard that was only discovered a couple of years ago.

On the knitting front, lace knitters, we can start the party today!

Susanna Lewis's long out-of-print book, Knitting Lace is being reprinted by Schoolhouse Press and is currently available for pre-orders!

If you were planning to sell your copy to pay for your retirement, I guess you're out of luck. But if you've been watching copies on eBay go for $100, now you can order your very own for $29.95. That's only $5 more than the original price back in 1992.

Now I can finally order my own and quit worrying that the library's will go missing.

One of my favorite things, a cone of . . . gray string?Very nice string. ColourMart cashmerino string, over 2100 yards of it. I'm not sure what it's going to become yet.

When I cut and pasted the Woywod chart, I discovered that the join makes a little three-petalled flower, so I am going to knit enough of a second repeat to make that show.
Our son kept saying, "What flower?" when I showed him this, so I dragged the photo into PhotoStudio and made free with the spray paint tool.
Now I only have about five more pattern rows before the flower is finished, so I must go knit!

Feels Like Fall

The weather is cooling off, and we finally have the new soapstone ministove completely installed. Is this thing cute as a button or what?

It took us almost a year to the day to get everything ready. We tore out the old furnace closet, scrapped the nasty old inefficient LP gas furnace, bought a cabinet & countertop to put it on, and came up with a heatproof pad for it to sit on. Then we had help installing the chimney and had to find someone to connect the gas.

This morning (44F, 7 C), manual in hand, I turned the little knobs on the side and look, flames and everything!

We still have to get through the yuck period of high-temperature paint-curing smells, but we only have to go through that once.

Anyway, I did promise knitting, so here's what I've been knitting.

In the back of The Knitted Lace Patterns of Christine Duchow Vol 3, there are several hand-drawn charts of patterns from the notebooks of Gertrud Woywod.

I started wondering what they looked like knitted up, and here is the result.

Not exactly Herbert Niebling, but interesting.

After a while, my brain adapted to /=YO, g=k2tog, r=knit, a=ssk, and rv=ktbl. I eventually figured out that "WM" (Wickel-maschen) was like what Mary Thomas calls "clustering tie stitch," where you wrap the thread around and around the base of the indicated stitches. A nupp would probably work, too.

But I got kind of tired of trying to see the cursive-written rs and so on, so I poked around until I found David Xenakis's Knitter's Symbols Fonts over at knittinguniverse.com.

A couple of hours of chart-translation later, I have a Burda-like chart I can read without taking off my glasses. I can see why some of the weirdness in this pattern happens. And I can cut and paste and see how it would look if I knitted more than one repeat.

So that's been my fun for the week! What's yours?

June Vacations

June was our vacation month this year. Earlier in June, we went up to the straits of Mackinac and took our son to Mackinac Island for the first time.

We were there just after the lilac festival, and the lilacs were still in full bloom.

We visited Fort Mackinac and I took these photos from up there.The lilac trees on the island are beautiful. And yes, they grow into trees up there! I saw some that were eight inches in diameter and larger. I've never seen them that thick down here.

The next day we visited Colonial Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City.

(Yes, Mackinaw City ends with a "W". All the other Mackinacs - island, bridge, straits - end with a "C". And they are all pronounced "mack-in-awe". I take no responsibility for 17th century French spelling.)

After climbing the hills on Mackinac Island, we were moving a little slower. My husband loved the earth oven. I know he wants one.

Then we were home for about a week, in the middle of which we had that burst of stormy weather.I took this picture on my way to work Monday, the day we got our power back.

I'm going to have to take my camera down this road again. They cut the three trees on the left that went down and righted the roots, so they have their yard back. Tree after tree along the road went down.

We had power for about a day and a half, and last Wednesday we woke up at 4:30 am as the power went off again. Truffles woke me up, and seconds later I heard the fan go off. I called the outage in immediately by flashlight.

The bad thing was, we were all set to leave again for Origins, the big game fair down in Columbus, Ohio, and so we wouldn't be around to run the generator if the electricity stayed off.

This put a damper in my morning, but then the power came back on at 7:30 am. Whew. Morning coffee and electric light in the bathroom! Yay!

We drove down to Ohio on a hot, hot day. My husband had reserved a room at the Defense Supply Center, one of the perks of being in the military. We had a bedroom and a kitchenette/living room area, and a reasonable drive to the convention center.

Yes, Origins is held in the Greater Columbus Convention Center, the place where TNNA held its summer show June 13-15, and where Knitters Connection was June 17-20.

One of these days I'll just go down for one or the other and leave Origins to my husband and son!

They had fun, and I brought knitting, hoping my dormant knitting mojo would sprout up again. And it did! I finally finished the miniature miser purse I started lo these many years ago, and I am down to the very last round and a half of Christel.

It was hot in Columbus while we were there, around 90 F (around 32 C), and nearly that hot at home every day.But I don't think this vending machine made many sales.

When we got home, I checked on the wrens and found the babies had died. I have no doubt it was from the heat. *sigh* I wish I had been home to help them escape. I think after the ants clear out of there I will block the opening with expanding foam so mama house wren can't try again.

Yesterday the weather changed over from highs of 88 F (31 C) to highs around 68 F (20 C). I guess even my cold-resistant northern blood has thinned out a little in the heat - I was cold. 68 degrees is even colder than the air conditioning in the convention center.

I covered the couch while we were gone with this big piece of scrap fabric from my days of working at an office furniture company. Between the stress and the heat, Ajax blew off undercoat like crazy!

Tomorrow I'll answer some questions & respond to some comments - that is, if my flaky wireless connection cooperates.

Christel-izing

A year ago, I first heard about a German lace knitting designer named Herbert Niebling and started trying to get hold of legal copies of his patterns.

This ugly-duckling octagon is a doily pattern called "Christel", from a collection of his designs calle Kunststricken Große und kleine Decken, available from Lacis.

I know - I meant to re-knit Leberblümchen, but I got sidetracked.

The thread is one of the vintage balls I showed last year, hanging in a net. 400 yards of ACE perle knitting cotton in grubby pale blue (grubby plainly visible under the Ott light).

I started this on four needles, but I don't like how some sections get squished when I knit an eight-section doily on four.

So I knit most of the dragon skin bag off of my 00 knitting needles and onto my 00 circular.

Poor dragon-skin! Every time I touch it, it seems like something happens: a dog munches it, my husband gets asked to deploy.

I'm starting to feel like I should have an exorcism or something for it.