Doilies Rock!

I decided on Wednesday that I needed to make my mother some doilies for her birthday. She plays bridge every Monday, and when she hosts she buys the little paper doilies to put under the snacks and so on. Well, I hadn't had any ideas about what to do for her birthday and was going to just get her a book when the words "knit" and "doily" collided in my head.

I picked out the "'Plastic' Doily" pattern from The Lacy Knitting of Mary Schiffmann. This one is called "'Plastic' Doily" because she copied the pattern from a well, plastic doily. But the plastic version had been pressed from a real knitted doily, and she could still see the stitches imprinted in the plastic well enough to, apparently, knit a duplicate. Little old lady lace knitters are not to be messed with.

I cast on Thursday morning, and finished Friday night (which, FYI, was my mother's actual birthday, but since I'm not going to see her until next Thursday I have several days in which to cheat on making presents). This is not as impressive as it sounds, because I only knitted 60 of the 102 charted rows, and ended with a mere 384 stitches per round, instead of the 600 one had by the end of the full pattern.

I shortened the pattern because I was using my beloved Cotton Fine and not teeny-tiny crochet cotton, and didn't want to end up with a doily three feet across. My finished doily blocked to 12" in diameter, which is right where I wanted. I bound off just after a big increase row, which caused a bit of a ruffle effect along the edge. I'm going to call that a "feature."

My ultimate plan is to make eight more, to use as coasters for the bridge players. I was going to use a different pattern, but then I looked at the center of the just-finished doily and thought, hey, if I just did the center of that, they would all match! Sweet!