Lovely Lace Laundering

I'm sure I've made no secret of my love of knitting lace.  However, thanks to Pinterest, I've recently been reacquainted with my love of other lace (all things lace, really).  When my mom took me to look at fabric as  kid, I was always drawn to the lace, be it eyelet or Venice style lace.

So, while I was surfing Pinterest and looking at skirts (because I've recently developed a desire to wear a skirt occasionally (this is a shocker to those that see me regularly because I have only worn skirts outside my apartment maybe once or twice a year for the past ten years (and only when visiting GiGi (Dude, this is four nested parentheticals! Score!)))), I rediscovered lace (I think we've talked about this before).  Now I want to put lace on everything.  I'm not going to (I'm still not sure why not, but GiGi said no), but I've been drooling over it anyway (my poor keyboard).

As a result, I purchased a 2lb assorted grab bag of discontinued or remnant lace from LaceHeaven (Yes, that is where I want to go when I die, why do you ask?) (It was one of only three they were selling, but there are also a lot of lots of lace on Ebay.  Go look, I'll wait.  Nice, right?)  The only drawback to it being leftovers was that much of the lace was stained with age and needed to be laundered.  (Don't tell anyone, but my inner fiber geek said "yay!")

So for the past week, whenever I've had a spare moment, I've been washing lace.  I've mostly been using Oxyclean because it really does power out the stains. 

I'm including a short tutorial in case you also ever have to wash lace.

Note: You'll want to try this on a small piece before you do the entire amount to test how the lace will hold up to cleaning and if you like the final result.

How to launder lace (using Oxyclean)
1) Add Oxyclean to water.  I used 3/4 cup to 2 gallons of water.  Stir to dissolve completely.

2) Place lace into the water.  Stir again to thoroughly soak the lace in the solution.  It should get really sudsy.

3) Soak for one hour.  (I recommend knitting while you wait, but if you've got something else you need to do... I'm sorry.)  Check after an hour.  If the stains appear to be gone, continue with step 4, otherwise let it soak some more.  (If not all of the stains have been removed after a couple of hours of soaking, they may not be coming out.  I recommend dyeing.  It's also a great deal of fun, plus what are you going to do with all of that white lace.)

4) Rinse thoroughly. I soaked the lace in the bathroom sink, but then used the bathtub to rinse.

5) Wrap in a towel and squeeze to remove the excess water. 

6) Long strands can be placed on a hanger to dry, but I recommend placing any appliques on a flat surface to dry. (I used the cardboard cutting board that I block shawls on.)

7) It usually takes about 8-10 hours for them to dry completely (probably less, but I like to be sure it's completely dry).

8) Giggle happily and wrap yourself in the beautiful, clean lace while doing a happy dance.  (This step is optional, but I don't know how you'll avoid it.)

The difference between the clean and dirty lace is quite dramatic.

Now to put lace on everything (::whistles:: Here Winnie!),
Joyce

P.S. Song of the week: Somebody that I used to know, Gotye.

Purl oriented centered double decrease- tutorial

Recently, while designing a shawl, I realized that I needed a way to do a knit side oriented double decrease but from the purl side (the stitch is worked on the purl side, but the double decrease shows up on the knit side).  Happily, I found a blog with a fairly simple explanation (plus a great photo tutorial) of how to do this.  Yay!

For many knitters, this might be the end of it, but it got me to wondering.  How would a knitter do a double decrease that was purl side oriented?

While fleegle's trick is super cool, on the purl side it look like an elaborate right leaning decrease.  I (and possibly you) want to be able to make a double decrease that is centered on the purl side.  But, alas, google was not helpful.  A search yielded no useful results (if I missed a tutorial for this, please let me know.) 

The knitting nerd in me (and that's a large part of me) insisted that I figure it out.

It turns out to be fairly simple to do.  All you need to do is: p2tog, s1, psso. 

I found slipping the stitch over on the right needle to be a bit tricky, so I moved the the stitches onto the left needle for slipping.  The less tricky (for me at least) way is what I've included in the photo tutorial below.

PSO-CDD (in 4 easy-ish steps):

1) Purl two together.

2) Move stitch from right needle to left needle.

 3) Pass slipped stitch over.

4) Move stitch back onto right needle.

Purl side view:

Knit side view:

So simple, yet so complex looking (as is much of knitting).  I hope this has helped you in your search to become a more nerdy knitter.

Just me, huh?
Joyce

P.S. I was pretty excited about my status as a nerdy knitter when I figured this out (even though I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who has).  So I texted TK and told her that I'd figured out how to do a purl side oriented centered double decrease.  A short time later I got a text in return that said, "Is it p2tog, s1, psso?"  Yep, ego deflated.  Tell me again why I hang out with such smart knitters?