Monday, March 31, 2008

Arnika

I had to put dragone in time out while I figure out if I skipped another stitch--I've already ripped 20 rows of it becuz I can't count.

Anyway, I was itching to for a Niebling fix, and I saw this little sweet doily and said, I'll do that one.
arnika
Isn't a nice sweet easy pattern?

A little bit about Arnica--it's a flowering plant that belongs in the sunflower family. Common name is wolf bane. It's used as a tincture for bruises and swelling. Not to be taken internally since it is poisonous. Has also been used as homeopathic medicine. (pic from Wikipedia)


All I can say is that I'm learning more about plants by knitting Niebling patterns than I had ever learned in college.

Anyway, back to the 'easy' pattern. It ended up not being that easy. It's actually quite challenging. There's an error at round 39 where there's an extra stitch unless you knit 3 together instead of 2 (like the pattern says). But the challenging parts?

Petals. Pretty petals. These consist of crossed stitches (that would be mini-cables for you all non-Niebling knitters).

And round 69? You bind off 12 stitches then pick them back up at row 70. How cool is that?! Oh, many thanks to , & from Ravelry for their help in decyphering German. I had babel fished it, but wasn't too sure.

So, here's my finished Arnika:
arnica finished
specs:
start date: March 28, 2008
finish date: March 30, 2008
thread: Cebelia #30
amt used: less than .5 ball
needles: US0 dpns and 0 Hiya Hiya needles
arnica close up
Oh, I should mention this is what I brought to knit on during the Ravelry meetup at the local library. By then, I was just knitting hex mesh, so it was pretty simple. The only modification I made was that I bumped up to US1 needles for the knit edge and then I actually knit 3X into each hex mesh so that I wouldn't get binding.

Back to trying to figure out Dragone...

7 comments:

Miss T said...

Beautiful!

fleegle said...

Gosh, that is just stunning! It's one of the lovliest little doilies I have seen of his designs. Never even heard of casting off and then picking them up again in the middle of a pattern like that.

punkin said...

Beautiful pattern.

Soo said...

Lovely! That Niebling -- he never disappoints.

BadCatDesigns said...

That is a sweetheart!

Kristina B said...

Very darling... and only two days? I salute you (I can't really count either... and this does not look like an "easy little pattern" to me).

Lacefreak said...

Really beautiful work! His patterns are such a treat to knit and you did a great job on it :-)