Mama Marmelade

Seeing as I blogged about Dad's Christmas present, here is Mum's too (now that she's got it and I can't spoil the surprise by posting about it on here too soon).

This was ably modelled by my friend Pam. Thank you!

Here's a bit more of a close up:

I thought I did well on the size.  I had to guesstimate and thought that at six repeats it wouldn't remain too small.  Yeah right!  I had no idea that blocking would get it to this size:

I wanted a pattern with some stocking stitch in it and not just all-over lace. This is beautiful.  It is from a Finnish pattern that thankfully had charts.  So, how difficult can it be?

Well, the chart symbols were just fine.  But it turned out that I couldn't make head or tail of a sort of wheat sheaf symbol and had to improvise.  I still have the correct amount of stitches, so this 'own version' of mine isn't a problem. I would have liked to get it closer to the original though because this stitch would have added a slight gather or butterfly shape to the top of the rounded bit of the motifs.

Still, it seems well enough!

The colours in the above pictures are a touch too sugary pink.  There is a light purple/lilac and a soft pink in this.  The following pictures don't show the right shades either - but here it goes, just to show what it looked like unblocked.

A bit of a close-up:

And while it was very much a work in progress:

The yarn is by Krafty Koala and I got it from Knit Nation in summer 2011.  I loved the colours, I quite rightly thought my Mum would too, but I didn't take into account that this is a gossamer lace weight.  Whoops!

Turned out well though, thankfully!