#needleworkmonday: The Dreaded Lace!

Hey fellow needleworkers!
I'm excited to dive back into #needleworkmonday, especially since I've missed posting for the last two. But I've been following all your beautiful posts and loving them, good work community!

I've been thinking lately of taking up a second career as a Motivational Knitting Speaker. You know: do the tour circuit, amp people up about the the higher powers of knitting, rake in the big bucks. Ok so not really, but you don't know how many times I've been knitting on a plane, train, or boat (yes, boat!) and someone's leaned over to admire my knitting and, sighing, tells me that they want to learn to knit someday. And my answer is invariably, "You can! It's SO much easier than you think!" I know it look intimidating to the novice, but I promise you it's not.

To really drive that point home, in this post I want to take on the topic that can send shudders up one's spine: The Dreaded Lace Knit. When I first began knitting I was impatient to learn it all. As soon as I'd knit my first garter-stitch craft I took on cabling. Not long after that I decided to try my hand at lace.

Detail of lacework from The Miller's Daughter shawl (pattern by Mairlynd)

And let me repeat myself: You can do it! Lace knitting is so much easier than you think! Alright, so it's not as easy as knit-knit-knit-knit ad infinitum. But the stitches themselves really aren't complicated. The tricky part is paying close attention to where you are in the pattern. If you can pay attention, you can knit lace.

Lace is basically the regular incorporation of holes into a knitting pattern to create webbing. And the secret behind the hole is the Yarn Over, the easiest thing you will ever do in knitting. Literally. You loop the working yarn over the needle you are knitting onto from front to back, and carry on knitting the next stitch. Here's a visual:

Told you it was simple. The trick is, each yarn over makes a new stitch. That means that you have to eliminate one stitch per yarn over to keep your pattern regular. There are several ways to eliminate stitches: knit 2 together, passing a slipped stitch over, slip-slip-knit, and probably several others that I still haven't come across. And they're all almost as simple as the yarn over. A quick YouTube search will comes up with hundreds of videos for each of these stitches (thought I'm willing to bet that even the noob can figure out what "knit 2 together" means.)

Ok, are you ready for my gem of wisdom when it comes to knitting lace? Here it is: Don't lose your place! Do whatever you need to do to keep track of where you are, because lace patterns are all about regularity. You start getting those yarn overs out of place because your knitting shifted over a stitch from where it should be, and all of a sudden beautiful lace turns into a big mess of random holes. When I first started knitting lace I came across the best advice I've ever gotten, which was to use stitch markers as though your life depends on it.

stitch markers, stitch markers, stitch markers!

A typical lace pattern might look like: K2, [yo, sl1, k2, psso2] repeat pattern between brackets to last two stitches, K2. Which is plain English basically means you make a border of 2 knit stitches to each side, and between work the lace pattern over and over until you hit the other border. Use a stitch marker between each of the pattern repeats so that you don't lose your place! It's sooooo much easier to come to the end of one section of lace pattern and say "that's weird, why am I at the end one stitch early?" than to come to the end of an entire row and say "Where the h*ll did I go wrong?!" And if there's one thing about knitting lace that's truly a pain in the neck, it's undoing lace. So save yourself the trouble, and put those stitch markers in at the beginning!

This jumble is what happens when you don't use stitch markers! Luckily, it's in the corner of a shawl I was knitting for myself, so I figured I could live with it.

Second most important tip: write down where you are in the pattern every time you put your knitting down! I've skipped this so many times out of laziness, thinking I'd pick it up again in a few minutes or that of course I'd remember where I left off, and have spent so much time trying to decipher my knitting to figure out what row I'm supposed to start on when I finally pick it up again 5 days later. Believe me, just write it down.

I hope this has inspired you all to pick up your needles and start knitting! Whether it's lace or not, it's so much easier than you think!

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