Embellishing with Doilies

Doilies-My initial mental picture is a plastic covered living room bedecked with coarse cotton doilies on every available flat surface, Oh and shag carpet. But that is just a stereotype perpetuated by Hollywood and is no longer the true reputation associated with Doilies. Doilies are cool now- no seriously, cool!

Just check out what Jared Flood has done to help the Doily on its way up the social ladder with his Hemlock Ring Blanket. Doilies do not have to be just doilies either. You can knit or crochet them up to be just about anything these days, blankets (as above), shawls, bowls (with some setting spray) or adornments. You can control the size of your doilies by using different size yarn, needles and altering the patterns. I choose to make some different doilies to embellish a plain tank top. I choose several doily patterns and some worsted weight yarn. However, no matter how small I tried to make the doilies, they still came out too big to embellish my tank. So I just knit the centers of the doilies and cast off once I had the size I liked. Some of the edges curled and some didn't and I like that. I used a 100% cotton yarn to make it washable and durable as I am a big tank top wearer in summer and these will get lots of wash time since Potty training is set to start soon in my house. I originally tried to glue each flower on with fabric glue but that didn't work for several reasons:

1) the fabric glue ruined the stretch of the rib knit under each flower

2) The fabric glue darkened the tank top under each flower so the glue had to be applied perfectly

3) My little girl could easily pull off the flowers

So I hand sewed each flower which was better in the long run than the glue because I could keep the shape better by hand tacking each doily in place and in the shape I liked.

What I really like about most doilies is the openness of the design which really makes it perfect for summer time projects. You could work up a bunch together for a hem detail or even some to adorn a matching headband. The options are endless and they only take a few minutes for each.