Netting Needles, part II

These days, I am in netting needle heaven. I have gotten the most wonderful, enormously gorgeous needle for my birthday, and it is breathtakingly beautiful craftswomanship.
I'm sorry that I can only give you a picture with the needle wound with thread, and thus you won't be able (yet) to see the wonderful finish of the passage from shank to tips - but this is my "no brains needed" craft, and I could not keep from winding it again the evening before taking the photos, when it had run empty.


It is made from brass, after one of the London finds given in "Textiles and Clothing", and it works like a breeze for my normal mesh size of about 4 mm. I'd like to try my hand at smaller mesh sizes one day, but first I will enjoy this utterly wonderful netting needle with the fast-to-work larger meshes, currently on a net that was inspired by the twocoloured one I blogged about here.


Here you can see the mesh size. I tried a new version of casting on, but I had a few problems with it, so there are some irregularities in the net especially in the first few rows. After the long cast-on loops, there are five rows of normal-sized mesh, then one row for doubling the number of meshes. After that I am now continuing with red thread (madder) for a while - I still have to get a feeling for how much thread on the needle will last for how many rounds.
In the picture below, you can also see my normal gauge, which is a shashlik stick shortened and smoothed with fine sandpaper, resulting in the 4mm mesh size.



I have a free day tomorrow (hooray), so the next blog post will be on Wednesday - have a good time until then!