Wilhelmine

A Little Knitting Mystery

I've probably mentioned before that one of my favorite knitting books is Mary Thomas's Book of Knitting Patterns. Between that and Mary Thomas's Knitting Book, there are very few aspects of the knitting universe left uncovered. A technique might be called by an obscure name, but it's probably in there, however briefly. This pair of books has history, lace, garment design - even how to graft ribbing.

They are full of little historical snippets that make me want to know more: what happened to Mrs. Hermann Tragy's knitting collection? (WWII, I'm afraid.)

Does the amazing piece of knitted lace shown in the Pattern Book on page 190, Fig. 194, still exist?

But today's little mystery is this: on page 241 of her Pattern book, Fig. 235 (on the left in the photo), Mary Thomas has what the caption calls "Knitted Doyley. Modern Danish."


I've always liked this little doily, and guess what was in one of the recent Niebling reprints, Schöne Spitzen?

That would be the charted pattern on the right, Wilhelmine.

Now I know a lot of stuff is getting tagged "Herbert Niebling" that probably isn't. Knitters these days have a lot more name recognition than they ever did in the past, so putting Herbert Niebling in as the designer is more likely to sell patterns than admitting that the designer's name is lost.

But Mary Thomas labels this as "modern". To me that means it was published in her lifetime, and her book was printed in 1938. I have a hard time believing she would have mixed Denmark up with any part of Germany, especially since seven pages later she calls another doily Bavarian.

Soooo...

Probably not Niebling. Who was this Danish knitting pattern designer?

I'll probably never know, but it's a charming little pattern.

Other Things I've Been Playing With

One of the Ravelry groups I post a lot in had an auction for Japan, and I donated six modular orgami boxes. Five of them are folded in the first photo.
Two of them have twisted flower-like shapes on the outside, but some of them are like that on the inside instead, so I took a picture of the insides of tops and bottoms after I had folded the sixth box.


The Pi shawl that lives on the back of my computer chair needed a good wash, so I soaked it and rinsed and reblocked it. Blocking is a lot easier now I have these mats - each mat is 18 inches square, so you can get an idea how big the shawl is.

And in the spirit of finishing things I've had hanging around for years, I've been working on this spa washcloth I started two years ago.
I am finally to the point of knitting-on the last border. I have one last corner to turn, and then I'll graft the last eight stitches to the edge and it will be DONE.

I might need to knit a couple more little Nieblings to celebrate!

Progress Report

It's been a while since I took a photo of Glöckchen!

My camera batteries are low, and our battery charger is acting up. We really need a new charger.

Glöckchen is getting bigger than my circular needle, so I can't easily stretch it out to show the leaves and flowers any more.

I am just past the point of endless hex mesh and on to starting the border rows. It's such a beautiful pattern, 564 stitches in a round at this point (row 119, I think this is).

That's mostly what I'm doing when I'm not wasting time on Twitter.

Blog or Blog Not!

I got tired of waiting around for my blogging mojo to show up and decided to listen to Barbara Sher, who says not to wait until you feel like doing something - either do it or declare you're not doing it.

If you're going to draw, draw every day and don't wait for some magical state of wanting to draw that might never show up.

This is one of those things I remember and forget, remember and forget. Well, I've remembered it again: Do, or do not! Knit, or knit not. Blog, or blog not.

I've been knitting, finishing and working on finishing things I started a long time ago.

If you remember this one, you've been reading the blog for a looooong time. I started it back in August of 2007, after taking Galina Khmeleva's Orenburg class at the Michigan Fiber Festival.

I never really liked this wool: it's scratchy to knit with, and it smells bad. Now it's finally finished and cast off and it's done.

I started another quirky little Niebling doily from Kunststricken: Decken, Garnituren, Spitzen (Bände 408 und 760). This one is on page 9 of Bände 760, on the right in photo 15, chart 17. In the photo below, it's on my red 00 (1.75 mm) needles, and it's binding into a bowl shape.I was hoping it would block out, but off the needles, it still was pretty stubbornly bowl-shaped.

I didn't want a knitted coracle, even a miniature one, so I'm trying again on US 0 (2.0 mm) needles. It's still starting to bind around row 39, but it stretches out more like the photo.

There are a couple of these quirky little patterns, around 50 rounds in size, in Bände 760, and I'm looking forward to knitting and blogging about them.

Knitting Tragedies

Not the kind involving 500 stitches escaping off a circular needle.

I love lace knitting. But once in a while I run my head painfully hard into the brick wall of how undervalued this particular lacemaking technique is.

Yesterday was one of those days.

I stopped at the Blue Star Antique Pavilion and browsed around until I found these three doilies: Both of these patterns are in Knitted Lace 2 (Kunst-Stricken II).

The two white ones are the cover doily of the first section of the book.

The second one is a very pretty doily called "Anemone", on page 25 (page 17 in the original).

The tragedy?

I paid 88 cents each for the white ones. $1.88 for the colored one.

A Day Off

The last couple of weeks have been busy.

First, October eleventh I taught a braiding class for my lace group, the West Michigan Lace Group. The Monday holiday meant I had the night off from work, so I taught the class in the afternoon, then attended the meeting in the evening.

Both last week and this week I've been taking our son up to the public school to take the MEAP (Michigan Educational Assessment Program) tests. He was taking them with one of the sixth grade classes, so we had to show up in the morning at the time they were taking them.

The tests took about two hours each, so I brought Glöckchen along each day and worked on it steadily.I've nearly finished the fourth of the seven little bellflowers, and I'm up to round 80-something of about 150.

It's getting bigger and more difficult to stretch it out on the needle without risking pulling stitches off.

Today I took the day off from knitting on it, and went in to town to the antique stores.

I knew I heard something calling my name.

I saw this lazy Susan mirror tray in a booth last summer, and dithered over buying it. But when I went back and didn't find it, I knew by my sinking heart that I had really really wanted it.The doily is not under the glass - it's etched (or something) on the mirror. It's a perfect photo image of a real knitted doily. Isn't it beautiful?

When I spotted it in the booth again I snatched it up.

I will probably take the lazy Susan base off and hang the mirror on the wall, but the other thing I found was the smaller of these two little Delft-style teapots.I bought the bigger one last summer, and I could have sworn I posted about it, but if I did, I can't find it.

The bigger one on the left was very very dirty and had no top, and I soaked it in vinegar and then in bleach water, then in changes of boiling water before I dared make tea in it.

The little one on the right was perfectly clean and came with an unglazed strainer. It holds twelve ounces of water, just enough for a mug of tea plus a little warm-up.

Neither one has anything marked on the bottom, so all I can say for sure is that they are tin-glazed pottery, and very likely painted by the same person.

So a very satisfying expedition!

Can't Talk. Busy Knitting.

Glöckchen

Since I Last Wrote...

I saw a bit of the 65th Revival AAA Glidden Tour.

This is the shared parking lot of the Blue Star Antique Pavilion and the Saugatuck Brewing Company just off exit 36 of I-196 on the way to Douglas, Michigan.

My husband's homebrewing club often meets here, and I have spent the odd happy hour wandering up and down the aisles of the antique pavilion and exploring the many many booths.

I just loved the contrast between these two cars and had to get a shot of them together.

I finished the little Niebling I started. The booklet describes the designs on this page as "dreieckiges" (triangular), but this one wanted to be round.To me it looks like something inspired by Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. It's a little thing, 50 rounds or so, under 8 inches across.

Then I started another, Glöckchen, because these things are like Terry Pratchett books: even when I know what happens, I still have to work my way through and see how everything works out.

Friday the weather was beautiful, warm and sunny, so we went to the Frederik Meijer Gardens to see the Chihuly exhibit and the Art Prize pieces.

(And I will stamp my foot here and say this was all built after we moved out of Grand Rapids, otherwise I would probably work there.)

On the way, from the highway we saw a bit of the work being done on St. Adalbert's. We used to live near it, and the copper roofs have always been green, so it felt odd to see them all shiny and coppery.

When you walk into the lobby at the gardens, this is what you see on the floor:

The floor is all covered with these organic-looking bronze shapes embedded in terrazzo. This is the work of Michele Oka Doner, Beneath the Leafy Crown, installed this year.

All three of us have been to the gardens before, but I think it's always been in the spring, for the butterfly exhibit. This was our first fall visit.

My mom took our son to see some of the Art Prize works in Grand Rapids, and we saw some more here at the gardens (scroll down the right sidebar), but I didn't get pictures of any of them!

Instead I got lots of pictures of Chihuly glass and really big plants.

The sun splashed out on the orange glass in this one, but I took it anyway, trying to get the bridge in the background for scale. Then the woman in turquoise walked into the shot, and I took it. Look how HUGE those leaves are.

I love the tropical house, and our son did, too. I had a great time going through there with him, because he kept noticing things like the live finches flying overhead, and asking about different plants.

And then we went to the carnivorous plant house, and the arid plant house, and then outside. It was awesome.

If you've been reading Girl Genius, you'll appreciate my last picture:
Look at the fangs! EEEEEE!

Breaking the Hat Curse

I have knitted a few hats since I got back into knitting. But each one suffered from the Hat Curse: I could not seem to knit a hat that fit me.

I could knit hats that would fit apples and oranges. I could knit hats that would fit watermelons. I could knit hats that sort of fit me, but made my head look like a mushroom.

So when I started knitting a top-down hat out of the Jo Sharp Silk Road April sent me, it felt like a risk. What if this was yet another cursèd non-fitting hat?

But it looks like this yarn has finally helped me break the hat curse.

It's a plain, ribbed, top-down hat with about three rounds knit plain so the brim turns up automagically and doubles over my ears. I've worn it a couple of times when the temperatures dropped into the teens, and it's just right: not a brain-squeezer, not floppy and loose, just soft and warm and comfortable.

---

Someone asked me about the weight of the Elegant Yarns' Daphne I'm using to knit the Stargate.

In my project notes on Ravelry, I listed four other yarns that looked to be identical to Daphne.

They said, "Three of the yarns you list say cobweb/1 ply, and the other says lace/2 ply. Can you tell me which it is, please."

From left to right:

• white DMC 80 tatting thread
• gray Habu 1/12 silk mohair
• blue Crystal Palace Kid Merino
• Elegant Yarns Daphne (looks gray, but click on the photo: that's the optical blending of a green and a lavender ply)
• cream Misti Alpaca Lace
• pink DMC 10 Cébélia
• bottle green Jaggerspun Zephyr
• purple Malabrigo Lace

Both Daphne and the Jojoland Harmony I bought to use when the Daphne runs out are two-ply yarns, but as I hope you can see from my dark-day picture, at 800+ yards per 50 gram ball, they are closer to a cobweb weight.

Yarn weights are confusing! When you enter a fine yarn on Ravelry, your choice is between "thread", "cobweb/1 ply" and "lace/2 ply". But how fine a yarn looks doesn't match up by ply or even by yards/meters per gram. The fiber and how it was spun makes a huge difference.

I put the yarns in the photo in order of how thick they appeared to me. And looking at the photo, I'd probably reverse the Misti Alpaca and the pink Cébélia. But check out the yards/meters per gram:

DMC size 80 tatting thread	21	19
Habu 1/12 silk mohair	13.3	12.1
Crystal Palace Kid Merino	9.6	8.8
Elegant Yarns Daphne	17.5	16
Misti Alpaca Lace	8.7	8
DMC 10 Cébélia	5.7	5.2
Jaggerspun Zephyr	11.1	10.1
Malabrigo Lace	9.4	9.4

Were you surprised? I was!

I won't even put ply in this table, because then it just gets silly. DMC 80 is 6-ply, and Cébélia is 3-ply. I think the Malabrigo is a single, and the rest are 2-ply.

Like I said. Silly.

Once Upon A Time...

Once upon a time, there was an awesome blogger who had a drawing on her blog.

And I went there and read this:

" The Random Number Generator ...

... has spoken and the number it chose was 9! Also known as Alwen! Alwen, if you would be so kind as to email me your mailing address I will get your yarn into the mail post haste!"

And I thought I had sent April my mailing address. I really did. After a couple of weeks, when I would drive down my driveway and see my mail box by the road, I would think, "I should check my email sent box and make sure I sent her my mailing address."

I have one of those positional memories: if I'm taking a walk, I notice the grapevines and think, Must remember to bring the pruners down here.

In the house, leaving for the walk, I don't remember the pruners. Only on the walk, when I see the things I want to prune out of my way.

Finally, at the bottom of the driveway one day, I scrawled myself a cryptic note: Check sent email - April - mailing address?

And eventually, after searching through a couple of email addresses and their Sent boxes, I realized that NO, I had never sent her my address. So I sent a very apologetic, hand-over-face embarrassed email and got an immediate response.

And Friday:

Three balls of Jo Sharp Silkroad DK Tweed. The color is called "Cocoa" but to me it's more of an oatmeal or maybe a granola, with tiny bits of burgundy in it.

I think it wants to be a hat.

Thank you so much, April, and I apologize again for taking so long to get back to you.

Meanwhile, those of you who have been waiting for me to have snow: we're getting snow.When I took the photo, brilliant sunshine and snowflakes.

I hope this tufted titmouse soaked it up, because it's overcast and gray now!

Green, Red, and Glowing

Last year we got snowed on early in the season and the snow only melted in between blizzards. This year it hasn't snowed yet. This beautiful green moss is revelling in the mild weather.

The stripe of red in this photo is apples that haven't fallen from the you-pick trees. Michigan had a great apple crop this year, but there are so many apples in storage the farmers can't sell them all.

That bright spot there is our winter sun.

I've been knitting mitered squares to contribute to a blanket. These are cool, since they start from a 3-stitch cast on and then you knit until you get to 3 inches, 6 inches, or however much yarn you have. I'm using up sock yarn leftovers.

I finally worked out some of the netting patterns in the 19th century books I've downloaded from Google.This pattern is called round netting and appears in several books. It's made just like regular netting, but you twist the loop twice before putting the netting needle or shuttle through it.

Once I worked down to a small enough gauge, it made nice neat hexagons.

This one is the Grecian or rose netting. I had started a sample and then quit, thinking I was doing it wrong. Weeks later I stretched it out and saw it was working just like the engraving. There are a lot of variations on this one: it uses two mesh sizes, and the appearance changes a lot depending on the size difference between the two.

There are a lot more of these I haven't tried or haven't worked out yet. I have always had a hard time visualizing things from just words, and these old books are all words.

Give me a diagram and I can work backwards and see how the words apply, and given that the books have some engravings of the end result, at least I know what I'm aiming for.

Often I have to just keep bashing my brains against the words, and then one day I sit down and my educated hands start working away while my brain shuts up and watches in amazement.

For now, I'm mostly still in the bashing stage.

Early Days

I have not always been a knitter of lace and socks and mind-stretching double knitting.

This might be the earliest knitting of mine that exists. When I was in the fifth grade, our teacher gave us a mimeographed pattern for something called Pixie Boot Baby Booties.

You knitted a garter stitch square, folded it into a triangle, sewed up the sole and the back, folded the top corner down, and voila! you had a baby booty.

That was the theory, anyway.

When I was trying to learn to tat, my fondness for DMC shaded pastels had not left me.

This is not quite the first tatting I ever did. I think it's the second. I just stranded the thread along behind and started a new clover leaf.

No, I think this might be the first tatting I ever did, complete with ring joined in the wrong spot so that it ended up accidentally three-dimensional.

After I threw it across the room, I fished it back out of the corner, got a little squinty-eyed, and did it again to take the curse off of it.

You can't let these fiber arts think they're the boss, you know, otherwise they will make you no end of miserable.

Plainly my fondness for shaded colors has not left me. I'm up to row 21 on chart A of "Lilac Time", a row where each repeat starts with a shift of the stitch marker and a slip 1, knit 2 together, pass the slipped stitch over.

Another couple of rounds and these will really start to look like leaves. Then it will be on into chart B and a swath of lace ground.
It's been raining on and off most of this week, but this afternoon it finally relented a little and the sun even came out.

I went outside to give the birdfeeders a shake and found one last tiny sunflower of the season, barely nine inches tall, under the edge of the yew bush where Truffles likes to dig herself a cool bed in the sand.

A sunny bright yellow flower to enjoy at the end of a chilly and damp day.

Knitting a Stargate

At least, that's what it looks like while I'm knitting it.

I've had this ball of Elegant Yarns' Daphne in my stash for a couple of years, and for some reason I suddenly urgently needed to knit some kind of shawl/scarf/stole thing out of it.

Knitting mojo, go figure.

It goes away for a couple of months, and when it comes back it's got all these extravagant plans, like an eccentric aunt who visits at odd intervals and gives you a shopping bag stuffed with an old mink opera cape and tickets to the closest concert.

Or another version of the Idea Pterodactyl.(This is Fay Wray being carried off by the pterodactyl in the original King Kong.)

This yarn is a thin two-ply with each ply gradually changing color. It reminds me of the iridescence on a soap bubble.

With all the color going on, the lace pattern isn't going to show up very well, so I picked something fairly simple: "Lilac Time," from Marianne Kinzel's Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting. In the pattern, she has you knit this in the round, from the center out, then sew up the center slit.

I did not want to mess with sewing up a yarn this fine, never mind that I would never get the colors to match, so I played around with a prototype in cotton string and worked a variation of Judy Becker's magic cast on.

When I knitted the first plain round, I deliberately twisted the stitches in opposite directions to make a mock sewing line. Which . . . doesn't really show up in this photo.

At first this felt like the hardest thing I've ever done. But now my hands seem to have calibrated, and it's just like any old lace knitting: follow the chart, make sure the repeats have the right number of stitches, try not to drop any.

It's been excellent knitting, sitting next to the new soapstone stove, for the last couple of very windy days.

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!