 There are 28 projects and 22 illustrations in the Ninth Series. The subtitle is a fairly good description of the contents. Three patterns are hats or hoods/bonnets. There is only one shawl. Six patterns are antimacassars and another two are pieces of an antimacassar. There are five jacket patterns, five edgings and another five miscellaneous items. The two hats for children (French Hat for a Baby Boy and Infant's Hood) are illustrated and they're pretty fancy. The "Hood for a Lady" didn't have an illustration.
Some of the antimacassars in this series looked like they would be lovely. For the two done in Tunisian stitch (Tricot) with cross-stitch they say to just use the illustrations for the cross-stitch pattern. I think the geometric one at the bottom would be doable but I'd need to enlarge the one on the right to figure out that pattern.
 Here are some of the illustrations for the clothing items. I think the Dorothy Frock is adorable. It says it's worked in a "pretty, twisted stitch" and the skirt is done in the crazy stitch. I've seen the crazy stitch in earlier series and it looks similar to corner to corner but done across in rows instead of diagonally. The Gladys Jacket uses the loop stitch that I've been seeing a lot of in the previous series. That little Shetland Jacket might be a future County Fair project for me.
One of the more interesting household items is the Toilet Tidy. Everyone needs a Toilet Tidy to hang on the "knob of a toilet glass", right? They make it with peacock blue yarn and place a tin inside to help it keep it's shape.
I considered making the Wool Aster for next week but the Wool Dahlia didn't go as well as I thought it would so instead I'm making one of the patterns with no illustrations. It's titled, "Pretty Pattern for Using up Odds and Ends of Wool". Find out how pretty it is next week.
0 Comments
My Eighth Series project is the crochet medallion. Looking back, I should have taken a closer look at the illustration before I chose it. Here's the illustration:  Some things in the illustration match the pattern and some don't. The edging on the left side of the illustration has something very odd going on with the last row. That definitely wasn't in the pattern. See the odd spacing of the groups of three double crochets in a middle row? That was in the directions. The pattern suggests a thread that is probably the equivalent of size 10 thread and an appropriately sized hook. I used size 3 to make this a little bit bigger so it's more of a doily than a medallion. Here are the directions I wrote out with the US terms and my notes and changes and notes added in red as I went through this. Chain 8, join (I did a magic circle)
This was definitely not well written. The illustration didn't match and had some very weird edging. Here's what my symmetrical finished version looks like. I blocked to 10 x 10 inches. I like mine better than their illustration.  Rating: Is the pattern easy to understand? No 0 Does it look like the illustration? I'm not sure if it was supposed to. 0 Would someone use this? 1.0 Did I enjoy making it? Yes, it was so laughably weird that I did enjoy it and since I used size 3 thread it made it easier to see and redo things that weren't working. 1.0 2 out of 4  Weldon's Eighth Series is full of "Useful Articles" and claims there are 31 illustrations. The original version may have had 31 illustrations but I came up with 25 when I counted them. There are 24 patterns in this series so there is an illustration for every pattern and two illustrations for one of them. Nine of the patterns were for children or babies. The illustrations for some drawers, a little Jersey Jacket, an infant's Jacket and a muff and boa for a child are below. They also had two versions of baby boots, a petticoat and a frock.
For adults we have "Simple V-shaped Pelerine", a semi-circular shawl (below), and the Opera Hood (above right). There is also a ladies petticoat, another shawl and some gloves for a "gentleman'.
Some of the non-wearable items included the Square for a Quilt below which I considered making, a pretty Antimacassar with flowers, a complicated lace pattern and a fluted border.
There was also a crochet "medallion" and that will be my project for next week. If it turns out well it may go to the county fair in the doily category. My Seventh Series project is the Wool Dahlia. Weldon's says, "A very pretty antimacassar may be made with twelve of these joined together." I thought this would be a fairly simple pattern to follow since I had the photo to refer to.
 The pattern uses double berlin wool (worsted weight) and they suggest three shades of crimson and a small amount of black and brown. They use a No 7 bone crochet needle which translates to a 4.25 mm based on the Bell Gauge. I didn't have three shades of crimson so used Brown Sheep's Lamb's Pride Wool in turquoise, lotus pink, deep coral, plum, and olive along with a 4.0 mm/G hook. The first round was easy since it was just 10 double crochets in a circle. Then it got confusing. Round two says (terms changed to US): 1 single crochet on a stitch of the last round (easy), insert the hook again in the same stitch and draw the wool through, do 4 chains (all ok), wool over the needle and draw through the chain (wait, which chain? I just made four. It must be the first one to make a picot.) I did all of this but it didn't really have the 3D effect the illustration has and this continued with the following rows. Somehow the picots got confused in the fourth row (the pink one) but I just went with it.  The last few rows went fine but I don't love how this turned out. It's partially my color choices but also the weird picots didn't give it the bubbly look in the illustration. Either some little popcorn stitches or loop stitches might have looked better.
Rating: Is the pattern easy to understand? Nope Does it look like the photo? Half of it does so I'll give it 0.5 Would someone wear or use this? Maybe. 0.5 Did I enjoy making it? I enjoyed this less than I expected. I usually like making flowers and sometimes I enjoy figuring out the confusing directions but I just didn't like doing the first half. 0.5 Final score 1.5 out of 4 |
Proudly powered by Weebly