Shelda's Adventures with Lace

A Fine Rumpled Mess

My doily is done! My doily is done! I was very focused and got a lot of knitting done, much of it while enjoying the beautiful rose garden at the Shelter Gardens here in Columbia, Missouri. What a wonderful, peaceful place to knit! I wish I'd had the digital camera, I could have treated you to photos of roses.

I was almost disappointed to finish the last knitted row, and not only because I knew I would then get to crochet the doily off the needles! Those last rows do get awfully long. Something about changing what you're doing every so often makes it easier for me to keep working on a project. But I've been thinking about knitting some large round doilies for the tables in my house, so there will be a lot of long rows in my future!

I was at my friend Jude's house for the crocheting off, which is perfect and appropriate since she's one of the most-accomplished crocheters I know. We have a long-standing (and perfectly amiable) "argument" about whether knitting or crochet makes the most beautiful lace. I think I nearly have her convinced that knitting is the best! When she watched me crochet once her only comment was, "you don't love that." And indeed I don't, although I'm reasonably capable with a crochet hook.

Binding off this doily (as so many others) involves joining groups of stitches together with a single crochet (in this pattern you join three stitches each time). This is "fastmaske" in Norwegian (abbreviation "fm"), and is translated in the books I've seen as "double crochet." But then there's a discrepancy between the UK English and US English "double crochet." What the UK calls a double crochet the US calls a single crochet. If you look closely at photographs of the doilies, it's clear that the "fastmaske" is a single crochet in US parlance.

To begin crocheting-off, I hold the knitting needle in my left hand and a crochet hook in my right. Slide the crochet hook through three stitches on the knitting needle and remove them from the left needle, pull the thread through, single crochet with the loop waiting on the hook, and then chain six (chain is "luftmaske" or lm). Repeat until you can't stand it anymore, take a break, and come back and do it some more *grin*. It seems to take me six times as long to do this crochet-off round as any of the knitting rounds, but perhaps that's just an illusion. And you want to be VERY careful not to drop a stitch during the process. Picking it up again is not a bit of fun (you can probably imagine how I know).

At any rate, my knitting on this doily is done, and I have only to block it out. Here's a photo of the crumpled mess pre-blocking.

Now for the blocking!

Posted by Shelda at May 23, 2003 05:09 PM