The one on the left is the one my great-grandmother (Nanny) made. This is my mother’s father’s mother. I have several of her pieces, including a tablecloth that’s still in pretty decent shape. The one on the right is the one I just finished. [For all images, click for bigger and better.]

I always liked this graceful oval pineapple doily. It’s in very good shape, and it stays in my living room. A couple of years ago, a fellow fiber artist gave me a bunch of her mother’s old pattern books, since she knew I’d get more use out of them than she would. I was thrilled to find the pattern for this doily! The pattern is “Oval Pineapple Ruffle Doily” (except without the ruffles) in Star Doily Book No. 91 Sparkling White Doilies, ©1952, The American Thread Company. Oddly enough, ours are both in ecru instead of white. And there will be NO RUFFLES. (I hate ruffles. I also hate filet crochet, but that’s another story.)

Nanny’s doily is approximately 14.5″ x 10″, right in line with the pattern, in size 30 thread. I did mine in size 100 thread, and it’s about 9.5″ x 6.5″. After you do the central wheel and pineapples and then start to work in rounds, the pattern gets hard to follow about Round 3. I had this thing almost finished, but it was puckering pretty bad. I counted my pineapples. Nineteen. Hoo-boy, that is a bad number of pineapples. After studying the front cover, I saw that I should have 20 pineapples, not 19. So I ripped that sucker out and started over. It took several attempts and some careful parsing of punctuation and typographical symbols to sort myself out, but I finally did. Here’s the funny thing – Nanny got tripped up in the same place! She ended up with 18 pineapples, and made it work. Someday I’ll count her stitches to see how she accommodated, but it tickles me that we had problems at the same place in the pattern.

I’ll finish up with my “secret” for pretty doilies of any size. Block the holy hell out of it. I make blocking pads out of foam core, appropriately graphed or concentric-circled paper, transparent contact paper and some packing tape. Pin everything out with rustproof pins, spritz with water and let dry. Do not skimp on the pinning. Blocking makes the piece. Click on this image to see what I mean.