Lavender & Lace

LAVENDER & LACE
1-PAGE PDF PATTERN – £0.90
favourite & queue on Ravelry

Here’s a quick, pretty, pretty quick project to use up left-over lace-weight yarn, and an hour or so of your evening. If you use ribbon cut out of clothing, and lavender from your garden, you can feel the added smugness of being terribly thrifty.

A few suggestions, as always:

If you’re giving woolly handknits as gifts, wrap a sachet with them to counter any “sheepy” smells.
Knit a few sachets for yourself over the winter, so you can use them to pack away with your winter clothes when the weather grows warmer.
Slip one or two sachets on hangers and fill them with mothballs, to keep dreaded larvae from snacking on your cashmere. I recommend throwing one or two in with your stash, too.
Needless to say, you can put other things in your sachet, like jewelry, sweeties, stitch markers, milk teef, tisanes, nibs, buttons, and other trifles, trinkets, and things.
Knit the pattern with thicker yarn and larger needles for a larger pouch, into which you can put even greater things! :)

Materials

Small amount (less than 50m / 55 yds) of Rowan Fine Lace or other leftover lace-weight yarn.
Set of 2mm (US 0) DPNs,
3mm (US 3) needle for cast-off,
tapestry needle for weaving in ends,
approx. 20cm / 8in of thin ribbon,
and a tablespoon of dried lavender.

Gauge: 35 sts / 40 rounds over 10cm / 4in in stocking stitch in the round.
Finished size after blocking: 5cm / 2in wide and 11cm / 4.25in at the tallest point.

Instructions are charted only.

I will leave you with this lovely poem by Noyes. Until smell-o-vision is invented, the olfactory evocation of poetry must suffice, and although I’m not sure who the hawker is who Noyes exalts, I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel a certain affinity with him. :)

LAVENDER by Alfred Noyes

Lavender, lavender
That makes your linen sweet;
The hawker brings his basket
Down the sooty street:
The dirty doors and pavements
Are simmering in the heat:
He brings a dream to London,
And drags his weary feet.

Lavender, lavender,
From where the bee hums,
To the loud roar of London,
With purple dreams he comes,
From raggèd lanes of wild-flowers
To raggèd London slums,
With a basket full of lavender
And purple dreams he comes.

Is it nought to you that hear him?
With the old strange cry
The weary hawker passes,
And some will come and buy,
And some will let him pass away
And only heave a sigh,
But most will neither heed nor hear
When dreams go by.

Lavender, lavender!
His songs were fair and sweet,
He brought us harvests out of heaven,
Full sheaves of radiant wheat;
He brought us keys to Paradise,
And hawked them thro’ the street;
He brought his dreams to London,
And dragged his weary feet.

Lavender, lavender!
He is gone. The sunset glows;
But through the brain of London
The mystic fragrance flows.
Each foggy cell remembers,
Each raggèd alley knows,
The land he left behind him,
The land to which he goes.