Keeping my short-row toes crossed.

In case you are a new visitor or you haven't been paying attention keeping up, I will come clean: Hi, my nom-de-blog is MezzoDiva and I am totally obsessed with Dayflower Lace. (please insert the appropriate 12-step program greeting response here).

About 20 years ago I became addicted to knitting the first time, and for a couple of years I was hooked on the line of Pinguoin yarns from France and their pattern books. It was there I first laid eyes on what remains to this day my absolutely most favorite lace pattern. They referred to it as Campanula (Bellflower). You may be familiar with it by the name Dayflower Lace as it is called in Barbara Walker's 2nd Treasury.

I'm addicted. I can't escape it. It haunts me. Whenever I knit other floral/leafy lace motifs, invariably they just do not compare. Sigh. As a result, I can probably knit that DFL in my sleep! In a (failed) attempt to exorcise (or at least alleviate) the obsession, I recently created a sock using the DFL and named the pattern "Campanula" for nostalgic reasons.

After much trepidation (do I even dare?...) I submitted the design to Knitty last week, sometime around 1:00 am the night before the summer issue deadline (which is why the early preview pix on my blog have been temporarily removed). It's my first design submitted anywhere for public consumption, so wish me luck!

I have to thank all my sock test-knitters - you all did me proud!

First was the intrepid and swift Lisa, who cut through her first Campanula like it was butter and whose eagle-eye found the first typos. She's no slouch, our Lisa!

After some initial false starts, Carol's Campanula came along beautifully and she was soon able to show some fancy legwork. Carol too found some eratta for me - whew! Carol also claimed she was a lace neophyte. (Snort.) Yeah. Sure, Carol. Whatever you say. She also has an unfortunate propensity to channel Bill Haley and the Comets (“We’re gonna lace-around-the-clock tonight…”), but we can forgive that because she’s so darned nice dammit.

I met up with (blogless) Shelna at Knitomatic's SnB a few weeks ago and we discussed some modifications. Shelna is an extraordinarily even knitter (domo arrigato, knitster roboto), but somehow her double decreases weren't coming out evenly: her SK2Ps were dramatically tighter than her K3TOGs, with the result that on one side the lace looked beautifully even, but on the mirrored panel the bell-flowers were looking rather drunkenly slurred. We replaced the SK2Ps with a K3TOG(TBL) to correct that problem. I was doing that on my newest pair of Campanulas and it's much more elegant, so I put that mod into the final version.

And last but certainly not least, the amazing agile Angela whipped up her own Campanula, caught a couple more of my pattern errata (when I could no longer see the trees for the forest), and tried out the sizing adjustment for me.

These lovely ladies all found my typos, corrected my mistakes, gave me oodles of useful feedback and challenged me to think through and justify each design choice. As I refined my pattern to make it ready for prime time, I incorporated all their input.

I am more grateful than I can say.