54,180 Stitches

Hee,hee. I’ve finished it! It’s not blocked yet but it’s finished. I figured out that I knitted 54,180 stitches doing this doily. On size 10 crochet cotton. On US size 0 needles. That’s a jolly awful lot of stitches! Unblocked it measures about 30 inches so should be about 32 once the blocking is finished.

I think I’ll wait a little bit to start the smaller thread.

Balmoral

I’ve made quite a lot of progress on the Balmoral ‘coffee cloth.” I’m all the way to round 111 which, considering I started the weekend on round 71, is pretty good. There have been no more pattern mistakes and the more challenging part is past but you still have to pay attention and there is still a lot of counting needed to be sure I don’t miss something. At the moment I’m up to 624 stitches! There are 137 rounds in all before I crochet off the edging and the last will have 840 stitches. I’m definitely going to need to cast on a simple project to work on after this!

My thistle is beginning to show...

The Balmoral coffee cloth from the Marianne Kinzel “Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting” is coming along, not quickly but it’s coming. In fact, last night I thought I was in trouble when I dropped a stitch along the side of one of the thistles. I was able to pick it up but it doesn’t look great. I also made a mistake along the top part of a couple of the thistles but I can live with it, especially since I know this isn’t the final product. I really don’t think many people will even notice the issues and, like I said, I can live with it.

I did find a mistake in the pattern on round 53. Round 51 ends up with 42 stitches but the pattern only uses 41 stitches for round 53. To be honest, I can’t remember where I added the stitch but I will post again when I get to that point with the next version.

Here are some views of it so far…

Still Knitting

I'm taking another watercolor class this spring but for some reason I'm feeling really stifled this time around - it's just almost overwhelming to even start something. It feels a lot like writer's block - is there a painter's block? Guess it's sort of the same thing. Anyway, we've had 2 weeks between classes and I started a couple of things that I'm actually happy with so far so maybe that's a breakthrough. Of course, I never did like to do things that I wasn't pretty good with from the beginning but I'm hanging in there with this because I really love watercolor painting and I really do want to get better. Ain't gonna happen without some practice though, that's for sure.

I was going to start the Balmoral Thistle Dinner Cloth with the size 30 thread this weekend but I decided to work a little more on the size 10 just to give it a fair chance. I’m just getting the head of the thistle and am only about 20 rows from the “Coffee Cloth” size. I really don’t think I’ll go further than that with the size 10 but at least it will give me something to show for my effort. Actually, now that it’s big enough to put on the circular needle, it’s been a lot easier to work, although it still looks too chunky to me. I also realized that, for some reason, I was working it really tightly on the double points (not like me at all) so I calmed down, loosened up and now it’s going a lot better. You can see the thistle leaves and the head beginning to develop here.



I’ve also made it almost to the end of the black/grey Dalek and I’m totally digging the color combination. It was an absolutely gorgeous day on Saturday so I spent quite a lot of it sitting on my porch knitting and listening to the birds. One of the cardinals was getting really brave, hopping around and shouting just about 4 feet from me. Mighty fine. Didn’t even dampen my spirits to see rain all Saturday night and all day on Sunday.

Of course, we’re counting our blessings seeing what so many others went through this weekend – between tornados and earthquakes. So heartbreaking to hear about all the people, mainly children, who were lost in the earthquake and right on the back of the disaster in Burma.

Hummmm....

OK, so I’m working on my new lace ‘dinner cloth' (see previous post). The pattern calls for size 60 thread, which if you’re not up on crochet cotton sizes, is just slightly larger than sewing thread. I chose not to use size 60 thread for a number of reasons including the fact that I have no idea how many of those little dodahs I would need to finish a dinner cloth.

There’s no problem with substituting cotton sizes on doilies or dinner cloths, which is a good thing, but you need to substitute an appropriate size needle as well. Since that’s the sensible way to do it, I substituted size 10 cotton. I didn’t, however, change the needles. To be totally honest there were several reasons for this. 1) I had size 0s out for the Dalek; 2) It’s a size that I have both double points (for the beginning of the dinner cloth) and several lengths of circular needles (for when it gets larger); and 3) I didn’t really think it through.

I used the size 10 thread because in the last 2 doilies I made, I wasn’t so crazy about the smaller thread in the knitted doily. I do prefer it for crocheting doilies but not so much for the knitting.

Now the combination of those 2 things and the fact that this pattern is quite advanced and uses a lot of knit 3 togethers has made for a rough start. So now I’m re-evaluating. I’m 27 rounds in so not too far – sounds worse than it is because of course you start so small - it’s only a couple of evenings’ work. If I’m going to change now is the time to do it. I only have 1 skein of the 30 but I can still get more of the same lot so I may just go that way.

In the meantime, I’ll get back to my shawl and looking for gold wool in my stash to make another Dalek.