Reverse Engineering Crochet

I celebrated a milestone in the unpacking project by playing with a new pattern based on  a tablecloth edging I found while sorting through a bag that came out of the last box.

I'm doing a happy dance today.  I got the last of the largish boxes from our move in December unpacked.

There is still a lot of sorting and organizing and cleaning of too-long-stored stuff but these things are true:

Everything is in the room it belongs in.
Everything is grouped by similarities in kind or function (crafts, papers & books, office misc., food & cooking, HABA: Health & Beauty Aids, bedding, clothing, cat misc. laundry, cleaning, tools, DVD & CD entertainment, Computer/electronics)

That sounds good and in some cases almost looks good but it is still superficial.  That was just a gross sort.  I still need to do two or three passes over most of it refining the sort until everything is in its best possible home for maximizing use and efficiency.  The two biggest projects are crafts and papers which will need up to five passes and it is really hard with both of them not to get sidetracked into doing projects as I discover something I'd forgotten all about.

Like today when I found an old (as in older than me) table cloth with an embroidered border given to me by my mom a few years ago.  I can't remember it's backstory.  But I got intrigued by the stitch and wanted to see if I could figure out how to duplicate it for a bookmark.  After hours of trying, taking out and trying again, I still had only a few rows and was still not happy with my inability to keep a straight edge .  First it wants to curl around the foundation row and second it wants to either shrink or grow on the sides.  Third I doesn't shape up like the one in the table cloth it is round rather than diamond shaped.  Forth it is bulkier by quite a bit which means the original must have been done with size 20 or 30 thread rather than the size 10 I'm using.  Thus mine doesn't have the delicate look and feel of the original which drew me to copy it.

For those interested the general principles of the stitch are :

after the foundation row work a row of single crochet alternating with a number of chains.  The size of the chain link governs the size of the mesh.  At the end of that row turn and work an odd number of single crochet over the chain that number needs to be double the number of chains plus one.  Do this for each chain in row just worked.  Turn and work another row of chains attaching each to the middle stitch of the shell below with a single crochet..

One of the interesting aspects of this pattern is that it looks the same front or back since for each row of single crochet over the chain loops you are working the same side.