This is the fourth and final installment of the Annals of Anality: Knitting Lyra, about an adventure in knitting a Herbert Niebling lace design. Previous posts are: Annals of Anality: Knitting Lyra, Annals of Anality 2: Knitting Lyra, and Annals of Anality 3: Knitting Lyra - Avoiding And Fixing Fuck-ups.
I finished knitting Lyra last week — I started on December 21, 2009 and finished the main body on January 25. Then there was another five days of getting Lyra bound off the needles.
I'm not kidding — five fairly intensive days to bind off. Because this is an exercise in anality, of course I can't do anything the easiest way.
Traditionally knit-in-the-round lace pieces are crocheted off — one executes a double-crochet through a set number of stitches, then crochets a chain of several stitches before crocheting together the next set of stitches. With Lyra, the instructions call for crocheting groups of 4 or 5 stitches with 13 chain stitches between each set.
I don't like that method of finishing off a complex lace piece. For one thing, when one crochets through a bunch of stitches, they all are slanting in one directions. Having knit thousands of stitches paying close attention to which way they slant in their decreases, then ending up having everything slanting in one direction offends my sense of anality — plus it just doesn't look right (or left, which is how the slant ends up).
Second, all those little loops of crochet don't really blend in with the rest of the piece — one ends up with curvy lines of lace, with sharp points of crochet all around the edge after the piece is blocked. WTF?
Finally, I totally suck at crochet and despise doing it. I've been knitting for over 40 years, and my skill level is high. I've also avoided crocheting for 40 years, so the contrast between the even execution of my knit stitches, and the sloppy end product of my attempts at crochet, are glaring.
Instead, I decided to adapt an i-cord* bind off to lace. For the i-cord bind off, I knit a round gathering the stitches as per the pattern directions for the crochet bind off, in groups of 4 and 5 stitches, with a double yarn over between each group. To make the groups slant correctly to the center, for the groups of 4, I slipped 2, knit 2 together, and passed the slipped stitches over. For the groups of 5, I slipped two, then passed the 2nd and 3rd stitches on the left needle over the first stitch on the needle, then knit the 1st stitch and passed the 2 right needle slipped stitches over.
I then knit another round, putting a make-5 (the largest number of stitch groups) into each yarn over. After that, I knit two rounds plain both to set the make-5 (the first round), and a second for stability.
To do the actual bind off, I ran a life-line (see Annals of Anality 3) through a half-dozen or so of the grouped stitches and their intervening stitches, then cast on three stitches at the beginning of the round (I use a cable cast on). The life-line allowed me to test the bind off, without having to make a separate swatch (an iffy proposition with lace in any event). I-cord bind offs can get tricky, because you are joining knit stitches (the finished piece) with knit rows (the i-cord). Knit stitches are not square — they are taller than they are wide, so you'll need to figure out how to make the row width match up to the stitch width. With the life-line, I could safely pull out the completed section to make any adjustment. Options for matching row-to-stitch are either going up a needle size or two, or putting in extra rows of i-cord. After I'd done a few groups, I could eyeball it and see that I needed to put in two extra rows of i-cord to each stitch group — meaning a total of 7 rows of i-cord between each stitch group.
An i-cord bind off is actually pretty simple, if time consuming — using 3 stitches, knit 2, slip 1, knit first stitch of the piece, pass the slipped stitch over, and not taking a stitch from the pattern where you want an extra row of i-cord. Because the number of stitches is so small, I could simply slip the left needle through the front of the 3 stitches on the right needle to transfer them back, and then pull it nice and snug as I pulled the thread to the front of the 3-stitch "row". When I finally — after 5 days — reached the end, I grafted the last row of i-cord to the cast on stitches.
This method of binding off is very labor intensive: in that final binding off row, there were 4,800 stitches — 8 pattern repeats of 25 groups of stitches, with 7 rows of i-cord between each group, and 3 i-cord stitches per row, on top of the extra 3 rounds of knitting getting it set up.
However, the i-cord actually makes the blocking simpler, as one doesn't need to pin down every stitch group and crochet chain. For Lyra, I just pinned the groups at the two "high points" – the middle of each flower, and the deepest point of the border. By pinning the place where the stitches were gathered, and not on the i-cord itself, the i-cord retained its shape and the remainder of the stitches found their own depth.
*The "i" in i-cord is short for "idiot". I-cord was discovered and named by Elizabeth Zimmerman when she was knitting a band on double-pointed needles and "like an idiot" forgot to turn her work. The result was a narrow tube of knitting