craftlog

Lace knitting takes too much concentration. Shockingly, I actually did it mostly right. Pattern from Stitch ‘N Bitch Nation. The main deviation from the pattern is the yarn, Patons Divine in chantilly rose. Using size 13 needles, the width gauge matched the pattern, but not the row gauge, so I had to do an extra 3 of the spiderweb repeats (the pattern should only need 4). I probably should’ve done another one, even. This yarn is also fuzzier than the called for yarn, which really obscures the lace pattern. It still looks pretty good, though. Where in the world am I going to wear it?

Practical things I figured out, which other newish knitters may find helpful:

• First, fix the mistake. This helps a LOT.
• YO just means loop the yarn over the right needle like when you are knitting a stitch, but you don’t actually knit it. Like, normally you would insert the right needle into the stitch on the left needle, make a loop, pull it through, then drop the stitch off the left needle. YO is just the make a loop part and nothing else. All the other complicated ways I read seem to lead to the same result. Unlike the totally misleading stitch instruction page in the book, YO does not include a knit stitch.
• In the purl drop rows (3/7), you drop all the YOs. The knits have little loops around the base where they attach to the stitch below, and the YOs seem unattached.
• After the purl drop rows (3/7), the all purl rows (5/9), and the complicated rows (4/8), you should have 92 stitches on the needle.
• When you sl2 pwise, keep the yarn in the back. If you bring it forward (like you normally would when you purl), you get a little extra loop that makes it harder to do the slipping bit.
• Pass slipped stitches over means use your left needle to take the two slipped stitches (stitches 2 and 3 from the point of the right needle) and pull them over the k2tog stitch and off the needle, as though you were binding them off. You can do them one at a time or both together.

Hope this helps someone out there strugging with this pattern. Would’ve saved me an evening of watching knitting movies on the web while repeatedly frogging fuzzy yarn. Once I got it, it went pretty well, though.