Flowers and Lace

All summer I've been leading my posts with pics from my flower garden. It hasn't usually related much to the rest of the post. This week, my garden mirrored my knitting with the explosion of Queen Anne's Lace blooms.

You see, I finished my Birch Catkins doily. My first finished Niebling! The Niebling Yahoo group took this design on as a KAL. Without further ado, here's my finished doily.
All in all, I'm satisfied. I took a wild guess and matched up size 30 thread with 2mm needles. It makes a nice fabric but it'll be interesting to see how the other versions turn out. A looser gauge might make a gauzier effect. For the crochet cast off, I used 12 chains and wish I had backed off and used less. But, I was uncertain how the thread would block out and wanted to have enough leeway at the edge.

There were a couple of issues with rnds 89-93 as charted. On rnd 89, there is a difference in a st between the Burda style chart and the one in Diana magazine. The third inc on the Burda chart should be a K2tog. That makes the repeat have 51 sts in it instead of 52.

On rnd 91--make sure the last stitch is an K/P increase. It wasn't included on my Burda style chart. But, even including that, the patterning didn't work out right. So, I worked a K2tog on one side of that last inc, and a SSK on the other side. So, to begin the repeat, I worked SSK,OO,K, K2tog, and then the full first box only twice and worked the last box once and then ended it with--SSK, K, OO, K2tog. Stitch count of the repeat still 57.

Rnd 93 needed to have another shift at the beginning of the rnd so that the extra stitch from the KP inc was used up in the SSK of the first st. Repeat stitch count 60.

Doing the above got me to where the vertical patterns are undisturbed when worked across the entire repeat on rnd 95. This is a close up of that section.

The section I redid is shown at the top of the arch where one pattern changes to another. I'm not sure how "Niebling" like my fix is, but I'm happy with the look of it. There are a few places where the holes of my hex mesh seem larger than others, so there's definitely room for improvement in the working of these stitches.

Just one last shot of the doily as it was blocking since it looks so pretty on the blue towel. Next time I want to make a real blocking board with circles drawn on it so that it will be easier to keep it round. I had limited time when pinning it out, and it needs alot of pins, so it's not perfectly round. Finished measurement of the diameter is 19". Made from Cebelia #30 in White with 2mm needles.

All in all, it was a very fun project. Now, it will be back to knitting the famous Niebling design--Lyra.