How to block a crochet lace crown: Part 2

Part 1

Okay, so my crochet crown has been pre-blocked to open up the lace.  Now it's time to block it to shape, using a glue based liquid that is supposed to be permanent.

First thing to do was make sure I had everything I needed handy.  Here are my materials.


The plastic bin that I used as a form.


Plastic food wrap.

White glue. (150 ml bottle)

a jar with lid to mix the glue with water.

a container to saturate the crown in.

laytex gloves.

Plastic drop cloth to cover your
work surface.



My older daughter also offered some glitter from her vast collection.  I ended up using all three colours.

There was one other item that I found I needed rather unexpectedly.  A spray bottle of water.

Make sure you've gone one handy.  You'll need it!!  Having to get one while in the middle of things is not fun.

Trust me on this.

You'll also need tape to fasten the plastic wrap in place.  I also ended up needing to use elastic bands large enough to fit around the bin.



First order of business was to wrap the bin in a layer of plastic wrap.  The plastic wrap, of course, stuck to itself really well, but not to the bin at all.  It takes a bit of doing to get it well covered.







After wrapping the bin, I poured the glue into the jar, then filled the glue bottle with water to get a 1:1 ratio.  Some "recipes" has a ratio of 2 parts water to 1 part glue, but it all depends on just how stiff you want the final product to be.  Given the longish chains around the triangles, I decided the 1:1 ratio would be best.

Then I added the trio of glitter.  I used the purple the most, with a fair bit less of the almost black purple, then a bit less of the reddish gliter.

Then it was time to close up the jar and start shaking.











Here is the glue misture after a whole lot of shaking.

As you can see near the bottom, there was still some that didn't really mix.

That done, I set the jar aside and got back to the crown.

















On sliding the crown over the bin, I found that, while pre-blocking it made everything nice and straight and open, my hopes that it would tighten up the base of the crown were dashed.  Once straight, the crown fell farther down the bin than before, almost enough to slide right off the open end.

So I put a double layer of elastic bands where I wanted the base of the crown to be.















One the elastics were in place and straight, I added a second layer of plastic wrap.

The elastic bands serve a double purpose.  They were a guideline for where I wanted the crown's base to be, with enough room for the rest of the crown below it, and it gave me something to pin the crown to.

















Time to get messy!

And cover everything with my plastic drop cloth.

Glue, gloves, bowl and crown at the ready.










After getting this photo, there was no opportunity for me to take more until after the crown was in place, since I no longer had a clean hand to hold my phone with.

Here, about a quarter of the glue mixture was added to the bowl and mixed in.  I did add a bit more later on.  It's really important to make sure all of the item is coated and saturated with glue.

Once saturated, the excess is gently squeezed out.  Very, very, gently.

Then it was time to put it over the bin, line the base up to the elastic band, then try and get it flattened against the sides.

Things got very hectic for a while.

What I discovered was that the glue on the surface of the crown, and on my gloves, would start to dry faster.  The parts of the crown against the plastic, however, were still very damp.  Which meant that, as I was trying to use my gloved hands to smooth the crown against the bin, the curved sections would instead stick to my hands and lift right off the bin.

I had to spray my gloved hand with water, as well as lightly spray the surface of the crown, to keep that from happening.

I also ended up taking one of the gloves off completely, since I found I couldn't grab the pins with the glove on.

The base of the crown was still wider than the circumference of the bin, so I had to rely on the pins and the elastic band to hold it in place, re-adjusting the pins as needed to have it all even around the bin.

Then I simply smoothed my gloved hand down the sides to get the crown to lie evenly against the bin's surface.

Along with needing to spray my hand with water to keep the drying glue from lifting the crown off the surface of the bin, I also found myself dipping out some more glue from the bowl to add to the surface as well.

Once done fighting with it, this is how it looked.















After a couple of hours, I used a damp cloth to wipe glue off the beads.

Then it was time to let it dry overnight.








And here we are, the next day!

Getting those pins out was rather hard on the finger tips!

You can even see the glitter a bit.

































All done, and looking good!



















 Isn't it pretty?  I was so happy with it!




















 A closer view of the beads, and you can see the glitter a bit better, too.











Of course, I then had to set up a pretty little photo shoot and get more pictures...



















 ...at different angles.


















Then I broke out Dolph to get some shots of the crown actually being worn on a head.

I tried it on Dolphina, but the female head is not at all human sized.  She would have done for a child sized crown, but not an adult size.  The crown just slid right over the face and down to the table.

I noticed that with almost all the display heads I've looked at.  The female heads are all stylized and tiny, while the male heads are more human sized and shaped.

Which irritates me.







But that's okay.  The crown looks fabulous on Dolph.


















Here are some more close up shots.

The points aren't quite as distinctive anymore, since I had nothing to pin them to to keep it, but they're still not as rounded as they were before the first blocking.












All in all, I'm really happy with how this turned out.

Once blocked, the larger size was much less of an issue that I was afraid it would be.  It's actually just normal head size.  So using a thicker cotton and larger hook turns out not to have been a problem at all.

In the future, I would like to find some way to cover the plastic bin with a layer of foam that I can pin to.  The bin itself is great for stability, compared to some of the other ideas I had thought of, like rolling up a towel or something like that.

The crown itself was quite easy and quick to make.  Figuring out how to block it was much more of a challenge, and the interwebz was of little help.  Which is why I made a point of taking so many photos and doing this step-by-step!

Happy crafting!

How to block a crochet lace crown: Part 1

I had a friend I wanted to surprise with a crochet lace crown.  The pattern I used was a variation of this free pattern from Red Heart.

I had a couple of issues with the pattern; the first being I didn't have any No. 5 crochet thread.  In fact, I've never even seen No. 5 anywhere other than online.  I've only been able to find No. 3 or No. 10.

My other issue was the disappearance of my 2.25mm hook.  I know I have one.  At least I'm pretty sure I do.  Even though I don't do thread crochet often, I do try to keep all my steel hooks together, but no sign of a 2.25mm anywhere.

So I ended up making the crown out of No. 3 crochet cotton with a 2.75mm hook.

Which means I knew I would have a final crown that was larger than the pattern.  And it already look pretty big on the model's head in the photo.

When I first started making it, because of the size difference, I followed the instructions for size changes and reduced the starting chain by 15.

It wasn't until I got to the 4th round that I realized the error in the pattern.  It's not a 15 stitch repeat.  It's a 30 stitch repeat.

Which meant starting over, but without trying to change the size.  Taking 30 stitches out of the pattern would have made it child sized.

Well, I wasn't making it to be worn.  I was making it for an inside joke.  So I wasn't too worried.

I also decided to add matching beads to the bottom of the crown, 1 bead for every 2 stitches.  In the pattern, there is no turning at the end of the rounds, but for the beaded round, I did turn it, since the beads are all at the back of a single crochet stitch.

Making the crown itself was not difficult.  It's only 13 rounds.  It wasn't until I got to the very last row that I realized why the pattern called for 2 balls of thread.  I was doing the many, many picots at the top when I realized I would run out of thread.

By about 2 feet.  Maybe.

Well, I was not about to go buy another ball for that little, and I wasn't too keen on the picots, anyhow.  So I redid the last round without the picots, and liked it much better.

It also left me enough thread to do a finishing round of single crochet along the bottom of the crown, which tidied it up and made it much nicer.

Now then.  If you've ever worked with crochet lace, you can probably guess what my next step needed to be.

Blocking it.

But how?

So I started to do some searches on how to block a crochet lace crown.

What I found were patterns.  And more patterns.  Free patterns and patterns for sale.  Adults crowns and children's crowns.  Fine lacy ones and chunky, dense ones.  There are so many patterns out there for crochet crowns!  And patterns for sale that had "blocking instructions included."

But no blocking instructions.

I did at least figure out that I wanted to block it so that it would permanently hold its shape and, with liquid starch apparently gone the way of the dodo, chose to go with a white glue based blocking liquid.

I was still left with the problem of how to block it.  I had lots of ideas in mind, but they all had flaws.

So I did what I usually do.

I winged it.

I decided to block it using a small, plastic garbage bin as a form.

Since I wouldn't be able to pin the crown to the bin itself, that meant I had to pre-block the crown some other way.

Which is why this is a two part post.

In this part, I have a step by step on how I pre-blocked the crown before I permanently blocked it on the form.



To begin, here is the finished crown, looking all lumpy and bumpy.










As you can see, it slid down pretty far on the bin.  I was hoping that, in pre-blocking it, I could be able to stretch the lace upwards enough that the base might actually tighten up a bit.

Blocking something that's round is always a challange.  In this case, I also wanted to make sure not to stretch the base in any way.  My solution was to use one of the most useful things in my craft room.

Styrofoam insulation.

That stuff is awesome.  I honestly don't know what I would do without it.  I've got the 2 inch thick type, which is ideal, and it's easy to cut the length and height to whatever I need.

I had some already cut down to block a cowl, so I cut part of it down so that the crown would fit loosely around it.

The great part about doing that is I could block front and back at the same time.

Handy.

Normally, I would wet block something like this, but this time, I chose to dry block it, just to keep the mess down.


The adult size crown has 5 distinct, overlapping sections.  This allowed me to pin out two on one side, one on the other.

Since one of my main focuses was to keep the bottom of the crown straight, without any stretching or distortion, I made sure to pin it down first, and very, very thoroughly.  I put a pin at the top of every double crochet, above the beaded round.


I then pinned the center point of the curved section, followed by the points of the triangular sections, stretching them upwards as far as I felt I could, without distorting the stitches.  After that, I pinned each point of the curved section, trying to match the heights and distances of each opposing pair as much as I could.




Once pinned, I held it over a sink and poured water over each side until the cotton seemed saturated.  This photo is of the now-wet cotton.

Can't really tell that it's wet, I guess.  You'll just have to trust me. LOL

















The next day, I unpinned the sections and turned the crown around so that I could do the remaining two sections.

Here, you can clearly see how much difference blocking makes!

In this photo, you can also see the seam of where each round began and ended.



Just a closer view of one of the remaining sections, after being pinned and soaked.

I left it to dry overnight again.




















Let's take a look at the crown before it was blocked once more...











 ... and compare it to after blocking.

Each "point", instead of having 3 picots, as in the orignal pattern, is simply shells of 2dc, 2ch, 2dc.  By pinning into the 2ch space, it created defined points, rather than the curved shape the shells before blocking.

I much prefer this simpler variation to the triple picots.  I appreciate it even more, not having to try and pin out each picot!  I would have run out of pins. LOL

And here's a closer view of the triangular section with the seam, and the beaded row.

Next up, wet blocking the crown into its permanent shape.

Is this awesome, or what?

My younger daughter recently completed a new shawl for her sister.  She bought herself a copy of Exquisite Crochet Shawls, and the pattern is the Galician Sea Shawl.

There were some minor modifications.  Instead of the recommended light worsted weight yarn in the book, she used, the medium weight Waverly for Bernat in Classic Navy.  She also used a larger 5.00mm hook. Because the yarn is a heavier weight and larger hook size, she made it several pattern repeats smaller than the pattern recommended.

Which, as you can see from the size of it, was a good idea!  Blocking it was a challange.  I don't have enough of those interlocking foam mats for something this size, so she had to make do.

The border rows alone took 1 1/2 balls of yarn, which means it took a total of 6 balls of yarn to make this shawl.

 Her sister loves it!

Catching up on my crocheted projects, part ten

Here's another hat using the Carons Simply Soft yarn. 



I wanted to do something with this diamond pattern.  The diamonds require a base that's divisible by 8, but I didn't want to do my usual crown in solid single or double crochet, so I experimented with something more open and ended up using a series of V stitches and shells.  I'm rather pleased with how it turns out.  The diamond pattern makes for a hat that's more decorative then warming, though!

More photos here. 

Waiting room project

This is the start of my next project, the Openwork Wrap from the new Lace Crochet class.  Still small enough to bring along to work on while at my daughter's guitar lesson.
I'm glad this project came with both written and diagram instructions.  I find the diagrams much easier to follow.

Little pieces of history, part eight

This is the last piece in my series of fancywork that I inherited.



This piece is actually from Poland, and I have no idea as to its original source.  My mother explained to me that these were traditionally made to hang on walls.  You can see that this one spent some time on a wall somewhere, long enough to develop dots of rust from whatever was used to tack it up.



The central design is free style cross stitch with a bit of stem stitch for the arms and legs, and stem stitch and straight stitch for the facial details. Including the border, it measures about 29" x 21 3/4"

The border is a long strip of bobbin lace that has been back stitched to the hem.  You can see how it was folded to turn the corners in the above photo.  In one corner, there is a bit of repair to the back stitch - in a brown thread!

Aside from the dots of rust and a bit of wear, the embroidered cloth is in pretty good shape.  The lace, unfortunately, has quite a lot of damage. 

Personally, I find the design rather unattractive, and the skill it was worked in isn't very good.  The cross stitches are quite uneven, with some looking more like V's and Y's than X's.  At the back, you can see knots were tied at the start of the threads, while a lot of the ends don't seem to have been anchored at all.  I'm rather surprised they haven't come lose at the front, but I guess being a decorative wall hanging rather than something that saw use, like a table cloth, has saved it.

Though I don't particularly like it, I find it an interesting piece and imagine that whoever stitched it must still have been pretty proud to have it decorating their wall.

Little pieces of history, part seven

Just a couple of pieces left in the series of fancywork I've inherited.  Here, I have another thread crochet piece from my late great-aunt.



I actually hadn't noticed that it was made with two different blues until I'd uploaded the photos!  It's a lot less obvious in person.

This is a small table cloth made out of square motifs joined together with a chain mesh.  It's 6 squares by 7 squares, with a narrow border, and measures about 42" x 36".

I love how the square motifs together create a secondary diamond pattern. 



Here's a closer look at one of the corner squares.  The squares are basically filet crochet worked in the round.

Like the filet crochet runner I wrote about last time, this piece is in fantastic condition.  There is no damage of any kind that I can find.  There are a few loose threads visible on the back, where the sewn in tail ends have worked themselves loose.  It's remarkably soft and has an amazing drape to it.  I actually had a hard time using the piano bench to take the photos, as it kept slithering off the edge. *L*

This is another of my favorite pieces.

Little pieces of history, part four

I've fallen behind on blogging about the wonderful pieces of fancywork I inherited.

I think this next piece is my favourite of them all. A gorgeous round tablecloth, just over 2 feet across, not counting the crocheted edging.



This is another piece from my great aunt. The fabric is thick and densely wove, and looks to be cotton. I got a little surprise when I examined it more closely for this post. A distictive numerical stamp on the back. I do believe this used to be some sort of sack! A flour or sugar sack, perhaps.




Here's a detail of the repeated floral motive. It is done in embroidery floss using satin stitch, stem stitch and French knots. The black marks that you see on the bottom are from what looks to be other numbers on the back, written in marker, that extend beyound the hem. The fabric was definitely repurprosed.



I just love this thread crochet border! There is some minor damage to a couple of lengths of chain that I have found, and a couple of dots of what looks to be rust, but aside from that, this piece is in suprisingly good condition. Very sturdy. I'm pretty sure I can fix the damage to the crochet myself, too, in such a way that it would not be noticable anymore. I just have to make sure I can match the thread, first.

The hem is something I find really remarkable about this piece. As you can see from the photo above, it has two rounds of machine stitch. Hemming something round is always a challange, so I'm impressed with how neat it is right from the start.

It's the back of the hem that has me fascinated! Looking at it, there's a bit more concern about the condition of the piece, and it will need gentle care.

The crochet edging was actually worked directly onto the fabric. It looks like a circle of single crochet was worked around the edge of the circle first, encasing about a quarter inch of fabric, but worked so that the top of the stitches faced *into* the work, instead of out. At least one more round of single crochet was worked after that, then there's a ring of double crochet worked around the edge, serving as the foundation for the rest of the edging, which is worked in rows.

The foundation portion of the edging is fastened down with basting stitches, the edge is folded under for the hem, then machine sewn, creating the hem and turning the crochet foundation to the outside of the piece at the same time. The very first round of single crochet is completely hidden in the back. This is the part that is showing some wear. You can see the loose ends of the weave through the crochet thread, and in a couple of places they've worked themselves out of the loops around them, leaving empty crochet stitches hanging around. Of the two rounds of machine stitch, the inside one used to just catch the edge of the hem, but as the ends worked themselves loose, very little of it is still attached. It's the outer ring of machine stitching that is holding the hem in place.

I can't tell if the edging was completed before or after the hem was turned and sewn. I would guess after, or the pulling on the fabric would have yanked the crochet foundation right out of the weave. Unless the fabric was cut *after* the crochet was worked. That's certainly possible. I would love to have seen it being worked.

It's a remarkable piece, and I just love it!

Little pieces of history, part three

Here's another piece of fancywork that was passed on to me. Unfortunately, I don't know a lot about the background of this piece.

(click on the images to be taken to my flickr page for larger images)



This tiny hankerchief has seen better days, I'm afraid. It's got a fair amount of damage and is quite fragile.



I added my gauge ruler so you can get an idea of how small it is. The border appears to be done in bobbin lace. The corners are worked into the lace pattern, not folded and turned, with a seam at one corner. Even with the damage, it's pretty remarkable work.



The embroidery is drawn thread work, with woven wheels done at the junctions.

With the fabric as thin and flimsy as it is, coupled with the damage, I have no way of judging how well done the original embroidery was.

I'm not sure how to handle this piece. I don't want it to get any more damaged. It might be worth searching out some specialists and find out.