Knit Doily 3

Knitted Lace Doilies

Blocking or Dressing a tea cloth on Zonta wires:

These are the Zonta wires I used to block my tea cloth. They are thin, stainless steel wires used for tig welding. They came shipped in a PVC pipe with covers on the end, so they can be stored there when not in use. There are many in the tube, but you probably can't see them well. Some are lying beside the tube.

This is my Rose of England tea cloth stretched on the Zonta Wires. If you look on the left and at the lower right, you can see where the individual wires overlap slightly. I put a fabric cutting board on my floor, and then I put a couple of terry towels over that. On top of all that I stretched the tea cloth. You can see that my cutting board buckled a bit from the pinning and stretching, but it doesn't affect the outcome at all. In some places the doily is so taut that it actually rises off the towels.

The cloth is wet and starched before it is stretched. In this closeup of the tea cloth on the Zontas, I hope you can see how I've threaded the Zonta wire through two openings in the lace edge for each scallop and pulled and pinned the wires down with T-pins. After the whole cloth was pulled out as round as I could get it, I went back and pinned out the individual lace openings around the scallops. Then I turned a fan on the whole thing and left it. It was dry in just a few hours. You can get information for ordering your own Zonta wires at this URL. Click on the name to go there. Zonta Wires

Marianne Kinzel's Rose of England, a Tea Cloth

This is my version of the Rose of England tea cloth. It is from a pattern by Marianne Kinzel, and it appears in her Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting. This is an easy pattern to do; however, it took *me* 22 years to do it! I started it and worked on it a little bit and then put it away, so it was shuffled here and there, and I nearly threw it out several times. Finally, I got it out and finished it. When it was done, the center section was dingy, so I put the whole thing in a solution of Biz, and it came out very white and pretty. In all, it probably took me somewhere around 2-3 months to knit.

This is the Rose on my dining table. You can see it is quite large. It measures about 40" across. I made it of size 20 cotton thread on size 2 needles. I also knit a little loose, so that probably contributed to the size. It lays very flat, and I'm very pleased with it.

This is the center section of the tea cloth. The streaks are the morning sunlight coming in my windows, not wrinkles in it.

This is half of the tea cloth. I am quite relieved to have this project finally completed. This is only one of Kinzel's designs I've made. I hope to get the others up on this site in the future. I must say, her designs are easy to knit, and they are quite pretty when they are finished.

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	These are the Zonta wires I used to block my tea cloth. They are thin, stainless steel wires used for tig welding. They came shipped in a PVC pipe with covers on the end, so they can be stored there when not in use. There are many in the tube, but you probably can't see them well. Some are lying beside the tube.
	This is my Rose of England tea cloth stretched on the Zonta Wires. If you look on the left and at the lower right, you can see where the individual wires overlap slightly. I put a fabric cutting board on my floor, and then I put a couple of terry towels over that. On top of all that I stretched the tea cloth. You can see that my cutting board buckled a bit from the pinning and stretching, but it doesn't affect the outcome at all. In some places the doily is so taut that it actually rises off the towels.
	The cloth is wet and starched before it is stretched. In this closeup of the tea cloth on the Zontas, I hope you can see how I've threaded the Zonta wire through two openings in the lace edge for each scallop and pulled and pinned the wires down with T-pins. After the whole cloth was pulled out as round as I could get it, I went back and pinned out the individual lace openings around the scallops. Then I turned a fan on the whole thing and left it. It was dry in just a few hours. You can get information for ordering your own Zonta wires at this URL. Click on the name to go there. Zonta Wires

	This is my version of the Rose of England tea cloth. It is from a pattern by Marianne Kinzel, and it appears in her Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting. This is an easy pattern to do; however, it took me 22 years to do it! I started it and worked on it a little bit and then put it away, so it was shuffled here and there, and I nearly threw it out several times. Finally, I got it out and finished it. When it was done, the center section was dingy, so I put the whole thing in a solution of Biz, and it came out very white and pretty. In all, it probably took me somewhere around 2-3 months to knit.
	This is the Rose on my dining table. You can see it is quite large. It measures about 40" across. I made it of size 20 cotton thread on size 2 needles. I also knit a little loose, so that probably contributed to the size. It lays very flat, and I'm very pleased with it.
	This is the center section of the tea cloth. The streaks are the morning sunlight coming in my windows, not wrinkles in it.
	This is half of the tea cloth. I am quite relieved to have this project finally completed. This is only one of Kinzel's designs I've made. I hope to get the others up on this site in the future. I must say, her designs are easy to knit, and they are quite pretty when they are finished.