edging number seven

It snowed all day today. It's almost dark, and it's still snowing. I didn't leave the house except to shovel the driveway and sidewalk; the rest of the time I did this and that and crocheted a bit. For some reason I remembered a Christmas ornament I saw at a friend's house last year; it was a clear glass ball with a crocheted "collar" around the top. Hmmm, thinks I, I wonder if there is a Little House lace pattern that would be suitable?

I figured I'd crochet enough of the Caroline Ingalls cuff lace from The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework to see how it would look possibly gathered to fit around the top of an ornament (all the Christmas stuff being packed away and hard to get to and it snowing so I wasn't about to drive to the craft store to buy an ornament to try it out on).

I crocheted about eight inches of cuff, but I don't think this is quite the lace for an ornament collar, although maybe if a ribbon was threaded through the top loops and tied around the ornament, it would look okay. The big scallops are kind of big and the rest has to be bunched up too much to show off the pattern. I was using tiny crochet cotton and a size 10 hook, so the lace is only about 2 inches wide. The pattern calls for size 70 cotton and size 14 hook to make lace 1-3/4 inches wide.

The original Ingalls lace is on display at the LIW-RWL Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri. I thought about typing out the pattern, but it's got so many sc and dc and ch, etc. that I'd be sure to mess something up... I looked up the copyright registration for the book and I don't think the copyright was renewed, but you never know. Better safe than sorry.

Once upon a time, I was really interested in the knitting and crochet patterns in the RWL book. I've got 12 yards of the "dinner cloth edging" ready to sew on a table cloth; I've made edgings No. 8 and 9 for pillowcases and I bought a modern interpretation of the 1870 sampler patterns, which I always wanted to double in width and make into a table runner (single width would also look neat as a curtain for a door sidelight, I think). But now that I've gotten the cuff/ornament idea out of my system, I'm going to get back to knitting some lace for a bed dust-ruffle. I'm not using a LH pattern; I'm using a pattern from a 1950 Workbasket magazine of my grandmother's.
- posted by pioneergirl at 9:58 PM