Finally Finished Friday #2

This week I finished a couple of new pieces that I started two weekends ago.  We went down to the Tacoma Polo Club for the last polo match of the season.  It’s a lot of fun to watch and goes great with tatting.  Next year I want to organize a large group of lacers, knitters and crocheters to go to a match together.  Sort of like when they do the Stitch and Pitch at the Mariner’s games, except that this would be Picots and Polo.   Or maybe Picots and Ponies.

Anyway, I had just come from the Lacemakers of Puget Sound meeting where we had listened to a talk on Irish Crochet.  I used to crochet, but only with yarn.  Interestingly, I had never liked actually crocheting with thread through I think it’s gorgeous.  I even created my own class as a directed reading course in which I studied the history of Irish Crochet during the potato famine.  But never liked actually crocheting with thread so I stuck with making blankets until I discovered tatting and switch solely to that.  (Crocheting was also starting to hurt my wrists.)

At the meeting I had with me a re-creation project I’e been working on for a while.  About a year and a half ago, Sarah Nielson and I were coming back from Bobbies and we stopped in Spokane for a quick visit with Camelia Crapo.  Well, our quick visit turned in to about 4 hours and we left with stacks of photocopies and at least a gigabyte of photos some of her gorgeous one of a kind doilies and snowflakes.  We vowed to recreate them and write up the patterns.  I took the doilies and Sarah took the snowflakes.

Cut to 18 months later, we don’t have anything shareable yet, but we have started playing around with them.  I’ve been working on one of the smaller doilies.  I’ll share details about that later, but at the LPS meeting two weeks ago, I realized that the very center part of the doily sort of looked like an Irish crochet rose.  I had to try to out so I started two of them at the polo club.

The first one is in size 10 and the second one is the left over size 80 I had on my shuttles from the bracelet I posted about a few weeks ago.  I really like the way it turned out with two colors.  The piece is done with two shuttles in three rounds, with the second round made up close, but behind the first round and the third one behind that.  The six inner rings are with shuttle 1 and all others are with shuttle 2 off of the base chain of each round.

I think it makes an interesting three dimensional snowflake or could be used like an Irish crochet rose as part of a larger piece.  And, of course, it makes a lovely center to Camelia’s doily.