Dianna Stevens had an idea for replacing some of the split rings in her New Twist on an Old Doily (broken link, but it was published in one of her books) with cluny leaves, resulting in her Cluny Leaf Coaster. I liked the idea.
I was inspired to wonder what a coaster would look like with leaves on diagonals that cross the entire center. It wasn’t as easy as I first thought to create the diagonals yet still make the coaster without cutting and tying, but I did it!
For the above piece, I used size 20 Flora, and it came out to be about 3.5 inches across.
This pattern requires 2 shuttles, and I recommend winding them CTM (continuous thread method). I wound both shuttles full (used an Aero and a Houtz shuttle with little thread remaining). You may find a picot gauge helpful, particularly when making the picots between leaves.
The piece is made all in one round. First I made the center 64 leaves and rings in the order indicated on the diagram, then I climbed out by means of the split ring indicated to make the outer edging of rings and chains.
The working method in the center roughly *leaf, ring with one shuttle, rw, ring with the other shuttle, rw, leaf* and repeat. What will vary is how you join the rings to each other, and the leaves to the space between leaves.
To leave a small picot at the base of leaf 1, I used a paper clip hung over the thread between the shuttles. I held it at the pinch when making the leaf, and drew it up when finishing so that I could remove the paper clip later and use my crochet hook to join to the loop at the end of leaf 64.
At each intersection such as between leaves 4 and 5, I left a picot using the gauge into which to join leaves 20 and 21. To close that picot, I made a double stitch before the next leaf (it is tough to try to leave a thread when making the next leaf if you do not close the picot). If you find that the ds between leaves 4 and 5 makes the arrangement too asymmetrical for you, you can move the picot over by 1/2 ds when you come back to join after leaf 20 – just pull up gently on the stitch cap to move the picot over. This may cause some upward (or downward) twisting, but you can take care of that in blocking.
Don’t forget to run your magic threads in the first chain after the split ring, and also the last chain of the outer round to finish the ends.
This page created 7 May 2000