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.

Spot the Repair

The horizontal threads are in the same position.

This is the only knitting I touched since I brought it home. I was afraid if I stepped away from it, I would convince myself it was too hard.

It actually got harder as I worked my way up to the top of the hole, when I had to CONNECT ALL THE THINGS, sewing the patch I had created to the unbroken stitches around and above it.

I commented on Facebook, "People who think I'm such a super lace genius are not familiar with my method, which is DO IT EVERY POSSIBLE WRONG WAY FIRST."

That line might make people laugh, but so many times I reached the end of a row, only to realize I had made a mistake two rows back that only became obvious when I tried to go on to the third row, and couldn't.

As a project, this was both satisfying and hair-pulling-outingly frustrating. I am pretty happy with the end result, but wow. Getting there was no picnic. I was happy to do it for a friend, but I would not do this for any amount of money!

Using My Powers for Good

So what good is marinating my brains in lace knitting, other than turning all evil snark-weasel on badly-knit examples of lovely lace patterns?

We'll see - I'm making an either brave or totally mad attempt to repair a good friend's triangular Orenburg shawl which has a hole chewed in it by her cat.


The yarn is Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk, which makes a nice stable stitch that doesn't run.

The hole runs diagonally, taking three diamonds out of the lace ground section, so it's not a simple matter of picking up at the bottom and knitting straight up.

No, it's a puzzle, this is.

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!

After Glöckchen, What?

Yes, Glöckchen is finally done and starched and blocked! Ta da!

This is one of those wonderful Niebling patterns, with no mistakes in the chart, no binding or ruffling to block out, just flowers and leaves standing out against a half-acre of hex mesh.
But you gotta admit, Glöckchen is a pretty hard act to follow.

One more glamour shot:


How can you top that?

How about with butterflies?

I was ready to leave for work when I saw these pretty things out nectaring on the swamp milkweed. It was a very hot and humid day, and they fluttered their wings even as they rested on the flowers.

These are Spicebush Swallowtails, Papilio troilus (aka Pterourus troilus). Some days nothing makes me feel older than trying to keep up with current nomenclature.

Flowers and Flowery Lace Knitting

I have a degree in horticulture, and my area of specialization was floriculture, but I don't have anything like an organized flower garden. I tend to plant things here and there, and because I recognize the seedlings and the early sprouts, mow around them in the grass.

I have flowers all over the place in random clumps. My brain presents me with scientific names memorized decades ago - where does it store all this stuff?I remembered the moth mullein was a Verbascum, but I didn't remember the species, V. blattaria.

My swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, is not growing in a swamp. It is growing out of a crack in a concrete porch slab from the original farmhouse site, about as un-swampy as you could get.

Ever since I noticed a few years back how much the hummingbirds liked the catnip flowers, I've encouraged it, but they aren't the only thing that likes it.

This Silver-spotted Skipper, Epargyreus clarus, likes it, too. The skipper is very territorial, and comes back to the catnip over and over throughout the day. When I went out to take its picture, it flew off, but not very far, and within a minute was back where I could take a close-up.

And here's my White Henryi lily again. I just realized I bought the original bulbs about 25 years ago, and it's come back reliably year after year. 2011 has been a very rainy year, but it made a fine show back in 2008, which was dry.

White Henryi is one of the lilies Donna Lee was talking about in her comment, the ones with a scent that knocks you down and sits on you. Most of the Oriental lilies are like that - the green nectary star in the center is a fairly reliable indicator of strong-scentedness.
Personally, I'm not a fan of scents that knock me down and sit on me, so the majority of my lilies are Asiatics with little or no scent.

The knitting on Glöckchen is done:The casting-off is . . . half done.

Each of the twelve repeats has twenty-two crocheted chains, and I am not a very fast crocheter. I was hoping to finish by Saturday, but along about Thursday afternoon I realized I wouldn't make it. I'm still plugging along, though, because I can hardly wait to block this thing!

Wednesday Bits and Pieces

First, a little bit of responding to comments.

Becky said, "So *that* is what those kinds of spiders are! We quite frequently have them trying to live in our mailbox."

They get in my mailbox, too! My husband emphatically does NOT like spiders (this t-shirt is just made for him), and when these come in the house in the mail, I'm the one who escorts them back out again.

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Cathy-Cate said, "My Asiatic lilies have never looked the same since a friend of ours (who is a landscaper) thinned them three years ago....he said they would bounce back better than ever in a couple years."

I have my suspicions about what he did! The way to thin lilies is to dig up all the bulbs after the stem starts to die and space them out, so each bulb has more growing room. But this takes a lot of time and a lot of labor.

The cheating way is to pull off the stems of some of the lilies in each clump, hoping to starve those bulbs out and let the ones left with their stems take over. This method is obviously a lot faster and easier than all that digging.

But the problem with this method is that if the lily variety is tough, instead of the stemless bulb dying, it just throws up a new stem the following year.

This new stem will be smaller and weaker and less likely to bloom, since it didn't get to store up as much energy when its stem was pulled off.

If this was what happened, I'd either leave them in place (the small stems will probably recover), or else dig them up and space them out in the fall.

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Catsmum said, "I don't want to know what the stitch count will be by the final row."

Well, that's the thing about Nieblings, they don't always increase in a strict geometric way. In this particular doily, the stitch count got to 76 stitches per round in Round 139, leaped up to 101 per round in 140 (that make-a-triple-yarnover-into-13 bit), and has been decreasing by two stitches per pattern round ever since.

I just counted out the last chart round, and it has 91 stitches per repeat, so I'll be ending at 1,092 stitches in the final round.

I also stretched it out a little against a ruler, and it's at least two feet in diameter, even knitted in size 30 thread on a 2.0 mm needle.

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In other news, we found some more beanie babies for Beanie Baby Wars.

An octopus mounted on an ice dragon.

A turkey mounted on a unicorn.

They're jousting.

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Ah! And I finally got a picture of one of the hummingbirds at the feeder this year. I waited so long with the camera all set up that the power saver kept turning it off again.

My camera's preview screen has a speed of 30 frames per second, and when I watch the hummingbird on it, I can see the wings moving! But they were still too fast for the camera and showed up as blurs in the photos.

Glöckchen Progress, Lilies, a SPIDER!

If you are spider phobic, and don't even like to see pictures of spiders, I'm giving lots and lots of warning so you can look away. There is a spider photo at the end of this post!

One of the knitting projects I took to work on at Origins was Glöckchen, but I had only knitted on it a little bit before I remembered one of the reasons I had put it down.

It was so seriously crowded on the needle at over 900 stitches per round that at one point about 11 stitches oozed off the needle while it was between bouts of knitting!

I twisted my husband's arm and had him take me to Knitters' Mercantile one morning before we headed in to the convention. I bought a second US 0 (2.0 mm) circular, so I could stretch Glöckchen out a bit again.

The stitch count peaked at 1212 in Round 139, where you make a triple yarnover and then knit into it 13 times in the plain row. I am finally out to Round 149 with one more pattern round to go after this.

We came home to lilies in bloom.



I just realized my "Tiger Babies" lilies from The Lily Garden have been in the ground here for 20 years.

They look pretty crowded at this point, but after twenty years in one spot, many lilies would have crowded themselves completely out of bloom.

Okay, is everybody ready for my spider? Spider-phobics safely out of the room?
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Last chance to click away before seeing a close-up of a bold jumping spider, Phidippus audax.

Is that thing cool or what? Eyes, nose, and big white lips!

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.

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!

Poem of the Day

Mud
by Polly Chase Boyden

Mud is very nice to feel
All squishy-squash between the toes!
I'd rather wade in wiggly mud
Than smell a yellow rose.

Nobody else but the rosebush knows
How nice mud feels
Between the toes.

I don't remember the first time I read this poem, but I have the last line thoroughly stuck in my head, and it leaps into my head spontaneously when I see spring mud.

April is indeed the cruelest month for weather. According to the local airport weather station, last night the high temperature hit 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 C) - at 3am! Now that it's daytime, it's only 41 F (5 C). We haven't had our April snow yet, but that would be very typical.

The first Diana Wynne Jones book I ever read was Archer's Goon. I can't put my finger on one thing that I enjoyed so much, but it made me search out more of her books, like Dog's Body and Howl's Moving Castle.

I tend to like books with a certain level of complexity and background detail, so that when I re-read them, I pick out things on the second (or third) reading that I missed first time around. Most of her books have that.

I've been paging through old April posts, looking for inspiration. It's hard to believe it's been five years since I first knitted a Pi doily.

Let's see, what else has been happening?

I've been knitting little Niebling patterns from Bande 760.

Fig. 28:
Fig. 17:
Fig. 6:

Crocuses came up:

And snowdrops:

And the snow finally melted away.