Many an Irish property was increased by the lace of a daughter’s petticoat.
[Irish Proverb]

I never knew if that meant the daughter flirted to get a husband by showing the lace on her petticoat, or if the lace was worth so much that it figured into the price of the property.

I knit this shawl using fine silk/wool yarn. I adapted Marianne Kinzel’s “Trifolium Design” from her Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting (available from Dover Books). I added clear glass beads to the crochet loops that finish the shawl.

I received this book for Christmas in 1965 and have knitted almost every pattern in it. There are no errors. In the forty years I’ve spent wearing out this book, I never realized the thought behind the pattern selections until now. Ms Kinzel designed and wrote her lace patterns in England, but was originally from Bohemia. In this book, she included four spectacular patterns that represent the four segments of the United Kingdom: Scotland—”Balmoral” (Thistle), England—”Rose of England,” Ireland—”Trifolium,” and Wales—”Daffodil.”