Puncetto

No, if everyone jumped off a cliff, I would not follow! However, after seeing the wonderful Youtube video of puncetto being made, I had to jump on the bandwagon as well! The video has been featured on several blogs by now, so I'm sure most people have already seen it.

Luckily for me, I had the Anchor Manual of Needlework, which has some rudimentary directions on how to make Puncetto. And they're in English! Supposedly that's pretty much the only English source of instructions. Well, except for a booklet that someone got off Ebay. I was happy to have my Anchor book and armed with the Anchor book, I set off to learn how to make puncetto.

I started with the strip shown above, which was worked on a crochet chain. It's supposed to be worked onto a fabric edge, but I figured a crochet chain works just as well!

The basic knots are quite easy to figure out. It might be the same one used in Mediterranean knotted lace, but I'm not sure. The two diagrams in the books I'm using to teach myself are slightly different. I suspect in the end it's the same knot , but I haven't played around with it to confirm that yet.

The first few rows were straightforward and I was getting all excited. As you can see, the problems started when I had to make bars and later the holes. Tensioning became more difficult and my holes are all different sizes. You can also see that when I made the rows above the holes, there are spaces between the knots - it's because I was making my holes too big for the lace.

I finished off with one spider. That was fun to make:)

At that point I was getting kind of bored just working on this strip and I was feeling adventurous (and confident), so I tackled a large project. A much larger project. The problem with the Anchor book is that it shows the basics and then it shows some huuuuuuge projects. Nothing in between. The larger projects also only show a photo with some cryptic written out instructions. Yikes!

As you can see by these two attempts, it did not go too well. I kept losing track of my stitch counts, my tension deteriorated as I went along and my squares were started to look more like proto-rhomboids.... In the first attempt (shown on the left in the picture above) I gave up before I even got to the solid blocks. Plus looking at it now, I think i messed up making the mesh anyways! In the second attempt (shown on the right), I got to the solid blocks before I completely and utterly lost track of the pattern. Seriously, I was happily knotting along and all of a sudden the photo (remember, there is not even a diagram!) looked awfully strange and I had no idea where to go from there. Not to mention that by that point, the tension was seriously off. At that point I put Puncetto aside for a few months (the strip and two attempts were made late winter/early spring)

Back to basics. A few weeks ago I made a little spider on its own. The spider was still fun to make:) However, even while making the spider I managed to lose track of the stitches. Somehow by the time I got to the last row, I had a few more stitches than what I started out with. Oops:)

It seems like puncetto squares are made from the corner out. I didn't bother doing that with the spider. I just started with the number of stitches I wanted to have along the base. I figure I need to get the basics down a bit more before I get into larger projects! It's been fun though!