Successful Lace Knitting

Today I’m participating in Donna Druchunas’s blog tour to give you a sneak peek of her new book, Successful Lace Knitting, which includes one of my designs, and to let you know about some other exciting things Donna will be doing in 2010. Enjoy!

Dorothy Reade was an expert knitter, spinner, and designer who was a publishing knitting patterns at the same time as Barbara Walker, Elizabeth Zimmerman, and Mary Walker Phillips. In fact, some of her original lace stitches are included in Barbara Walker’s Treasuries.

Anyone who knows me or my knitting knows that I love lace – but the dirty little secret is that I used to HATE lace. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t make sense of the written patterns, and sort of gave up on lace. Then I saw a book about lace charts by Susannah Lewis, and I was in love.

Dorothy Reade was charting lace patterns long before they were part of the mainstream. Folks who appreciate lace knitting owe her a great deal for her furtherance and refining of the craft.

The focus of Donna’s book are the charts that Dorothy worked up, interpreted by many designers in various ways. My own design in the book is based on a floral Lace chart. I took the motif and refined it further into a colorwork pattern, then blended the two into a soft & warm, easy to wear Wimple.

I chose Artyarns Silk Rhapsody because I knew it would work well with both the lace portions of the wimple and the colorwork areas, too. The mohair is a lovely choice for the lace portions, and the silk/mohair blend ‘fills in’ very nicely to create a rich colorwork fabric at either edge of the finished piece, and to give the piece weight to frame the face and neckline.

I’m SO looking forward to seeing all of the other projects in the book – it looks fascinating!