New Vintage Lace

Have you seen New Vintage Lace? I love this book! Andrea Jurgrau takes vintage doily patterns, lifts out and rejiggers their intricate motifs, and reinvents them as stunning hats, scarves, stoles, and shawls.

It’s a fabulous idea, really. Those vintage patterns contain motifs unlike any in today’s stitch dictionaries: starbursts, overlapping petals, and lush leaves, often placed on a backdrop of open mesh. They’re really quite spectacular… and yet, until New Vintage Lace, I haven’t seen many contemporary designers making use of these motifs.

What can I say? I’ve been inspired. I’m itching to go through some of my vintage pattern books – like Gloria Penning’s Danish Lace Treasures – and see the doilies as stitch maps. More to the point: to tease out wedge shapes that could be used in wedge shawls. Ooh, wouldn’t that be fun?

I’ve already fiddled around with a couple patterns from New Vintage Lace, creating wedges from the Peaseblossom Doily:

And the Sand Dollar Wrap:

See those double yo on rounds 3, 5, and 7? It seems a lot of vintage patterns use them instead of today’s more typical yo, k1, yo. You get a very different appearance! One large eyelet, instead of two little ones flanking a skinny little k1 column.

New Vintage Lace also has me thinking about taking the last several rounds of a doily pattern, and using them as the slightly flared edging of a stole like Jurgrau’s Cherry Blossom Stole, or as part of a crescent shawl like her Diospryros Wrap. Consider he final rounds of the Elizabeth doily from Gloria Penning’s Knitted Heirloom Lace III:

Wouldn’t that make a lovely edging?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some more fiddling around to do.

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