Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Briefly


I finished my fourth hanky! I'm a little afraid that the red will run when I wash it, but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Learning about edging things is an interesting process. For example, I was concerned that the edging patterns wouldn't compensate for having to turn corners, and would therefore be too tight and look silly. So far, I'm having the opposite problem: my edgings are looser on the outside than on the inside, so they tend to ruffle a bit. And in the example above, the little picoted arches are far too crowded to lay nicely side by side and display their beauty. Maybe I'm placing my initial stitches too close together--but if I did them farther apart, I would have to deliberately loosen and stretch my stitches, beyond my natural crochet tension. Since a lot of these appear to be designed to be crocheted in a long strip and then sewn on to fabric, it seems to me that a more natural chain should be the way to go.

But then again, I haven't washed any of these yet. It's entirely possible that my cotton thread will shrink, leaving me with the too-tight effect I was worried about initially. I guess we'll see!

3 comments:

Katie said...

I think its purdy!

maybe you should wash the hankies before you edge them?

Ann said...

I don't know--I left them unwashed because I'm using cotton thread to edge cotton handkerchiefs, so I guess I'm hoping any shrinkage will be reasonably even. We'll find out when I do laundry this weekend!

Barbara said...

Well, I like 'em whether they shrink evenly or not. And I'm thrilled that you're preserving an old art that both your Great-great-grandma Stephan and Great-grandma Angermeier and Grandma Malcolm practiced. Way to keep things going!

Love you!