Thanks to everyone for their outpouring of support!? I'll take you who wrote at your words, and continue posting about the dragon.

A couple of people asked how filet crochet differs from other forms of crochet. "Filet" in this case means net. It's meant to emulate darned net lace. Filet crochet typically uses only a couple of the various crochet stitches - chain and double crochet?(yes, there are exceptions to this,?notably when working a pattern with shaped as opposed to rectangular edges). It marches along row by row, not unlike an old-fashioned line printer, or a the way a stranded pattern builds in colorwork knitting. Other forms of crochet are less "row bound," often incorporate many different length stitches (singles, doubles, trebles, etc.), or grow in more than two dimensions (the heavily embossed Irish crochet styles spring to mind.)? In terms of technical skill in forming stitches, it's very easy compared to many other forms of crochet, and produces tremendous effect for the level of effort invested. Following the chart is the only hard part. I've already described my mantra to help me keep count.

One minor complication?- there are usually no detailed instructions given for filet crochet designs. Patterns at most offer instructions on how to do a filled mesh and an open mesh, give a chart and (if you're lucky) tell you how many stitches to cast on. Since most (but not all) filet patterns are for home decorative items rather than clothing, it's unusual for gauge to matter much beyond dictating the final overall size of the piece. Some patterns omit gauge entirely.Others give a range of gauges and final dimensions based on thread and hook size. Vintage patterns can be especially difficult to interpret as both the hook and thread sizes they cite may or may not correspond to modern sizes.

Which brings me to another oddity. For all the complaining we knitters do about lack of standardization in needle sizes, pattern format and yarn descriptors, crocheters face considerably more variation in both their materials and their written directions. There are a few contemporary standards. Size 30 cotton is more or less the same maker to maker, but not always so. Yardage for a given weight does vary enough to make it important enough to buy by crochet threads by yardage and not weight, just as one does for knitting yarn.

Hook sizes however are all over the map. I try to go by metric measurement rather than letter or number size, but I've found that even then - and especially in the smaller sizes - there is considerable variation between brand names. For this project I got finer, tighter results and a smaller gauge with a Bates #10 1.15mm hook than I could acheive with a Boye #10 1.10mm hook. One side effect of this sizing problem is that dedicated crocheters collect and hoard hooks of as many different makers as they can find, even more than dedicated knitters squirrel away needles. There are quite a few charts available on line that compare hook sizes both historical and modern, and among makers. Here's a good one at Norns.

The best on-line how-tos on filet crochet I found were at Hass,?SmartCrochet,?and StitchGuide. The lattermost has some Quicktime video clips illustrating some key points.

Which brings me to today's report on progress. I'm not posting photos every day because compared to knitting (and allowing for time pressure), my production rate is so slow:

Don't worry. the foreshortening on the right is an artifact of a sloping futon sofa seat and my inferior skills as a photographer. Still, you can see my corner stars and the repeat of the scrolling bit from the top/bottom border. I'm almost done with the right hand edge.I chose NOT to use the big flower underneath the dragon's foot because it's not quite centered in the top and bottom strips. Centering it in the side strips would call attention to that fact. If I don't like the way it looks when this strip is done, I'll rip it back and try again.

While I'm working on the left edge, I'll be?thinking about the final frame. That will incorporate some "long meshes" to make double wide, possibly double high holes through which the thin curtain rod/stretchers will be threaded, top and bottom.

Here's the second entry in a sporadic series on Knitting Books that Time Forgot. Many of these are long out of print (OOP), far from glossy, and have the shelf appeal of a trodden trout. But these older decidedly "unsexy" knitting books are sources of surprisingly good info, and can be found hidden on dusty public library shelves. Just because a book isn't new or written by a contemporary Knitting Diva doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile.

Today's poster child is The Complete Book of Progressive Knitting by Ida Riley Duncan. The edition I borrowed from the local library is the Liveright Publishing 1964 edition (the original was put out in 1941). ISBN 61-12134.

This book went through seven printings, and in its day must have been quite popular, judging from the large number of used copies available from various on-line sources. It's sparsely illustrated with faded black and white photos, but is mostly text and accompanying hand-drafted line drawings.

The author's premise is that knitting pattern design is mostly an exercise in drafting to gauge, and that a careful explanation of the math involved will make even complex pattern?shaping and design?more accessible to the average knitter. There are materials description and how-to sections, even a section of simple knit texture patterns, but they are cursory. Duncan wasn't really writing for people totally unfamiliar with knitting, even though she included basics. She was writing for advanced beginners or intermediate level knitters who wanted to expand their skills.

Now,?five years ago this book was less relevant than it is today. The fitted sillouhettes common in the '40s, '50s, and early '60s are making a comeback, and are sparking a change of shape in formerly?boxy hand-knits (think of all the recent patterns with nipped waists). This book is a clear, step by step description of designing those waist-defining, shorter shapes, and in designing fitted/set-in sleeves. There are quite a few books and software packages out now as pattern drafting aids, but they rarely go into detail on these more tailored lines.

Duncan gives directions for taking body measurements and designing a sloper (though she doesn't use the term); then translating the measurements into a pattern. Of course she stresses the importance of gauge as she explores pullovers, cardigans, raglans, blouses (as distinct from sweaters) and?skirts. She even touches on socks, hats,?and mittens - again from a mathematical base. Several different neckline and sleeve treatments are described. Interestingly enough, she advocates knitting raglans in the round, top down, and skirts in the round bottom up, offering up circle diagrams that look similar to some of the ones?in Knitting Without Tears.

On the down side, garment sizes and gauges are small (5 spi is the largest gauge used, with most of the examples shown illustrated in 7 or 8 spi), but they are appropriate to the garments described and the principles they embody can be scaled up. The tone is a bit "my way or the highway" patronizing (especially the vocations in knitting section at the end) and exclusionary of divergent methods or alternative techniques/approaches. Sort of what you'd expect from a prissy and dictatorial home economics teacher in the early 1960s; but I find tone easy to ignore.The hand drawn diagrams look a bit primitive, but they're clear, useful, and quite plentiful.

To sum up - this?might be?a useful book if you're into design, especially designs informed by the aesthetics of past decades. It's not the best exemplar of its type, but it does cover ground sparsely traversed by more recent publications. If you can find it in your local library it's worth a look-see; perhaps a used book purchase if you need a leg up on drafting more tailored options.

Returning from our sojurn at the Nature Channel, I pick up where I left off on Filet of Dragon. I've finished the center panel, and have decided to eke out the width with an additional panel of the same edging I used top and bottom.

I'm putting a strip of it at each end, centered on the best looking?curlique in the repeat. I've also decided to put plain quaternary stars in the corners, rather than butting the new strips up along the edge of the old ones. I still haven't decided on what frame to use on the entire piece, but by the time these strips are done, I'll have a clue. Or so I hope.

Here's progress to date:

You can see the beginning of the side frame at the right. Here's the layout logic:

What's a quaternary star?? It's the standard eight-pointed star/snowflake so often seen in Scandanavian and Fair Isle knitting. This sample's branches are four units long, but the one I'll use in this project will have shorter three-unit arms, and will fit into the 13 unit square corners.

Some of you asked about my de-beeing. Here's a photo summary of what happened.

The problem - an active honeybee hive of unknown age, in the walls and floor of a stucco-finish sleeping porch:

The solution - Jeff from Bee Busters - a company in Acton, MA. Jeff is seen here about to cut a one-foot square hole in the porch floor to get to the hive's probable location:

It turns out we were lucky in most respects. The hive was relatively new (in a 95-year old house anything is possible). It was mostly in the wall as opposed to being in the floor. While that was unlucky in that it required knocking an additional three foot square hole in the stucco, the hive was easy to remove. Here's one large piece. The queen is under the scrum of bees at the bottom corner:

The overwhelming majority of the bees were captured, including the queen. Some of the stragglers?were caught using a bee-vac, a juryrigged crate fitted out with a dust-buster engine and a three-inch wide flexible hose. The hummers are now?off to quarrantine to make sure they harbor no parastites, then after that - to work as productive little droners working away in local orchards and fields.

I'm delighted that no giant comb system existed. If it had, we'd have to go through a ton more demolition and restoration to get at the hive. The down side of it being a young colony is that I didn't end up with honey. Honeycombs are two-sided. If a comb has honey stored on both sides it can be harvested for extraction. These combs had bee larvae on one side and honey on the other, typical for newer hives but not suitable for people-use.

The gaping holes in my porch now sit open for several days to dry out. A few foragers out shopping when the hive was removed remain, but Bee Jeff assures me that they'll load up with pollen and follow another bee home to a new hive. He said that if they arrive "with groceries" they'll be accpeted by their new foster family.

All in all the experience was interesting, highly educational, but expensive. Now of course we have to repair those gaping holes...

Filet of Dragon

Thank you for all the complements!? Filet crochet isn't difficult if you're comfortable following a chart. It flollows the same logic as knitting a colorwork pattern in the flat from a chart - back and forth row by row. The hardest part is making the correct number of chain stitches to form the foundation on which the first row is worked. I did the math, then used safety pins to mark off every 25 stitches as a counting aid. I did end up being one short, so I cheated, and added a mesh at the end. If you look VERY closely to the first mesh at the cast-on tail, you'll see it's a bit heavier on one side where I slip stitched back up after making my cheat mesh?in preparation for the next row.

Once the count of the first couple of rows was established, the thing became a simple mantra of counting. Begin, A, B, 1, A, B, 2, A, B, 3 and so on, with "Begin" standing in for "make initial double crochet of the mesh," "A, B" being either work two chains for open meshes, or two more DCs for filled ones; and the number being the count of the open or filled meshes for that particular run.(UK crocheters read trebles for the doubles cited here.)

I used the improvised magnet board system I wrote about earlier. Since each row was "proofed" by the row that followed, my mistakes became almost immediately apparent. The two I did most often (and each only a couple of times) was skip over a mesh when making a long run of open meshes, reducing the count on the new row by one;?or substituing an open box for a filled one - in effect forgetting that the design on the new row was shifting up or down by one box to make a visual diagonal. Since I was both confirming the raw count of each segment as I worked it as well as doing the "work even/one more" system, I never had to rip back more than one row.

So to sum up, filet crochet is much easier than the complexity of the finished piece would lead one to believe. The style I used employs only chain stitches and double crochets, and once one is used to making even stitches,?is an excercise in chart-following more than anything else.

Some people asked me to repeat the photo of my book (The New Carolingian Modelbook), showing the dragon pattern page, so they could do a quick compare for the distortion effect. Here it is:

The camera has surfaced!? The 'net connection (briefly knocked out by overzealous electricians) is now up again!? I can finally post my progress on the Filet of Dragon curtain panel:

You can see the foreshortening effect I mentiond yesterday. I'll be adding additional panels of the scrollwork at the top and bottom to either end, then another framing of some sort around the entire thing.

Rushing off to check up on yet another contractor...

Another in-absentia post. This one reports progress as of 1 July. Again sorry to be not here.

Crochet in General

Crochet is not a dirty word. I know there's an ongoing friendly rivalry between knitters and crocheters, but I think the two crafts aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I teach a one-day workshop entitled "Crochet for Knitters" offered sporadically at my LYS and to local guilds (when scheduling allows). It covers basic crochet techniques, then veers off to cover techniques of special use:

• Crocheted chain cast-on, both free and done onto a knitting needle
• Crocheted buttons and button loops
• Simple crocheted edge treatments, including the dreaded Shrimp Stitch (reverse single crochet)

Crochet and knitting do produce fabrics with very different properties. Knitting by nature makes the thinnest, most flexible non-woven textile possible from a strand of yarn - loops are single-thickness, and lie as flat as possible. Given yarn and needles of equivalent size, crochet produces a much thicker, heavier, denser fabric - multiple loops drawn through each other form the basic stitch unit. Knitting has an elasticity and drape that no crochet can equal (again given equivalent weight yarn and needles).

On the other hand, crochet has its own set of advantages. For the most part, it lies flat compared to knitting - especially to stockinette knitting. It produces a very durable, stable fabric. It's also less constrained to "typewriter" row-based production (back and forth or round and round on a single plain of work). This makes things like relief work (think Irish Crocheted Lace), and 3-D freeform production possible. The learning curve for basic technique is also less steep. Crochet has only one basic movement - hooking a loop and pulling through another loop. Knitting has several?- forming knits, forming purls, and their several variants.

I learned to crochet long, long?before I learned how to knit. Like knitting, I taught myself from a book.I was around 7 when I?began making odd little squares with no particular use in mind, ?but I was a strange kid who read early and liked sitting quietly and making things.Knitting by contrast I didn't pick up seriously until after college graduation. ?One of the reasons I found Continental style knitting easy and natural was that I was already well schooled in holding and tensioning thread or?yarn with my left hand, an artifact of this previous experience. In fact, I believe that people having problems learning Continental style might benefit from a brief side-trip to crochet because doing so would acustom them to this skill.

Crochet has many forms. The ones I favor are the finer styles of cotton crochet, done with threads of various thicknesses. Although I did quite a bit of it before learning how to knit, I no longer do much large-gauge crochet with yarn heavier than fingering weight. I find the resulting fabric too thick and stiff for most uses. Afghans, hats and bags are the exception, although I much prefer the airy drape of knitted blankets to the heft of crocheted ones. Hats and bags however can benefit from the additional?weight and structure. Note that I do not recommend fulling or felting crochet. I've never had a good result doing so, probably because I've never hit upon the right ratio of working looseness that would give the yarn enough room to shrink evenly.

A final note on crochet - I get lots of questions at wiseNeedle on how to go about converting a knitted pattern to a crocheted one. Although books have been written on the subject, my answer is usually "with difficulty, and probably not successfully with the original yarn specified in the pattern."? This goes back to basic stitch structure. For a piece of crochet to have anything like the same drape as a piece of knitting, it has to be made from a much thinner yarn. A knitting pattern written for worsted weight yarn cannot be crocheted in worsted weight yarn with the same result. I'd use a fingering weight yarn, light sport at the absolute heaviest. Then I'd draft out a pattern schematic from the original design, do a crocheted swatch, and re-draft all of the required pieces based on the gauge of that swatch. There are no short-cuts or magic formulae, just plain old trial and error and calculation.

Filet of Dragon

For all of crochet's free-form possibilities, filet crochet is the most row-oriented form of the craft. Filet takes a graphed design, and interprets it in open mesh and worked mesh squares - sort of like net with some of the holes filled in. As I think I mentioned before, this is an aesthetic that dates back a long time, with several different crafts called into service to do it over the years. There are forms of darned netting and grounds, withdrawn thread work, and freeform needle lace that all produce roughly similar filled/unfilled box-based patterns. Crochet is the most recent, and (having tried most of the others), I can say?the fastest method developed so far.

Filet crochet production marches across a graph row by row. Reading charts for filet production is very much like reading a chart for stranded knitting done in the flat. You begin at the lower right hand corner, work across the first row right to left, then on the next row, return by reading across in the opposite direction. Filet crochet though exacting is a very easy technique. There are several excellent on-line tutorials. This one is my favorite. There are also quite a few filet pattens on line, but any design that can be graphed up on a grid using two values (open and filled squares) can be used.

All this being said, here's the progress on my filet curtain panel:

The 4.3 rows shown represent about three hours of work. I'm a much slower crocheter than I am a knitter, as unlike knitting, I have to actually watch my fingers to ensure the stitches are formed correctly and are in the right spot. The piece is about 17 inches across. The dragon panel will happen in the center, with mirrored strips of a vine-like edging at top and bottom. The safety pins mark the transition point between the dragon panel and the framing vines.

I'm getting?a bit more than 5?meshes per inch using a 1.15mm Bates hook and Size 30 thread (thicker than sewing thread, but not as thick as perle cotton or bakery string). Each open mesh is formed by a double crochet followed by two chains (the next mesh forms the other leg of the box); each filled mesh is formed by three double crochets (again the first DC of the next mesh completes the box). For UK visitors, read treble instead of double crochet here, as for some reason terminology differs on the two sides of the pond.

My intent during this blogging hiatus is to keep plugging away on this thing. My curtain panel is about 30 inches wide x 17 inches tall. I'm working across the shorter dimension to save sanity. Once the panel is done, I need to go back and add another couple of rows top and bottom with larger holes through which the curtain rods will be inserted. I want to block out the piece before I do so, as the width between my curtain rods is fixed. Adding on these strips after the main motifs are completed will allow me to do any late course corrections to ensure a snug and proper final fit.

A final word - as I was starting out on this project I received some very valuable advice on filet crochet from a good friend and needlework buddy?of long acquaintence. Kathryn Goodwyn may or may not be reading this blog, but if she is - ten thousand thanks!? My dragon would not be crawling out from under his rock without you. (Kathryn is an exacting?researcher and needlework/historical clothing?re-creator. Her?favorite sig line "Too many centuries, too little time," which says?quite a bit?about the breadth of her interests and expertise.)

I'm here but I'm not. Cut off from Real Communications, I've stored a couple of advance-dated posts. If you see this it's because I'm running on autopilot, and have not had time to revisit these pages and do a proper write-up. In the mean time, here's entertainment.

Filet of Dragon

This one is munching along, too. I've done some gauge squares with Size 30 cotton, and crochet hooks of various sizes that I could obtain locally and quickly. The two smallest are:

• Marked "Susan Bates US #10/1.15mm
• Marked "Boye US #11/1.10mm

Now the Bates needle, though marked as being larger has a shaft and hook that is noticeably smaller than the Boye. I'm using that one, and with #30 cotton am now getting about 10 meshes across the row = 2.25", 10 rows = 2.1". The stuff still looks leggy to me, but I doubt I'll be able to find a smaller hook before I head out on vacation (did I mention that mid-move complication?)

Here's my swatch, taken over no particular pattern of voided and filled meshes. I was practicing technique, deciding how I want to work into the stitches of the rows below, and whether or not I liked the look of crocheting into the open mesh instead of into the chain for filled meshes that appear on top of voided ones.

The lower, leggier, looser?part was worked on the Boye faux #11; the upper?tighter part?on the Bates #10. My working method was the same, I made no effort to work more or less loosely, and the difference is VERY evident. Go figure...