With being in the middle of Pesach (Passover), I've done lots more eating than crafting the last few days.....so, for this week's episode of WAYWO, I'm going to re-visit the whole idea of lace and encourage those of you who knit and haven't tried it to do so. It's much easier than it looks!
I'm pretty much self-taught on the lace front. My mother was an enthusiastic knitter but she produced stuff like this:
So I've been working lace out on my own, as it's not something she taught me. I started with a few borders on sweaters and hats before moving onto the big projectI talked about last week.
First, let me say that I'm not someone who thinks there's one right way to knit. Almost everything can be done a couple ways, depending on lots of factors like what the project is, what the yarn is, and what you want it to look like. So I'm offering the following advice with that in mind ;-)
Lace is simpler than it looks. The pink shawl I wrote about last week had regular knit and purl stitches, yarnovers, and just two more 'complex' stitches: k2tog (knit two together) and ssk (slip, slip, knit). If you've done anything other than straight scarves, those two more complex stitches are likely already in your repertoire.
The big thing lace takes is patience, especially when you are first trying it! Expect to count lots.....
Bits and pieces you should know if you try some lace:
- Charts are good. Written instructions are good. Patterns with both are better.
- You will make mistakes. The point isn't to knit perfectly, it is to be able to recognize and correct mistakes.
- Stitch markers are your friend. The $3 or $4 you spend on a package of them will be more than made up for in sanity saved. I put them between each pattern repeat so I can count small groups of stitches instead of whole rows. You can see some I used in the big pink shawl clearly in this picture:
- Lifelines are a great invention. A piece of thread or dental floss pulled through a row of knitting, to make ripping out much easier.
Some more lacy projects I've done, just to show that fairly limited lace skills can really spruce up a project:
A basic baby sweater (eyelet rather than lace, but the idea is similar):
The start of a tank top (still in the not quite finished pile....)
And also in the WIP (works in progress pile), a shawl for me from some rare breed (Wenlseydale Longwool) bought at Maryland Sheep and Wool*:
My next big project is going to be a triangular lace shawl for myself, but I'm still debating which pattern to use......if you have a favorite, I'd love to hear about it and see pictures!
* If you are going to Maryland Sheep and Wool this year, I'll be there on Sunday 5/3 if all goes according to plan. If you want to meet up, my email is in my profile.
As an aside: I recently had the the chance to go to a 3-hour lace class lead by Franklin Habit, who blogs at the Panopticon (which, along with Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, is one of my two 'must read' knitting blogs - even when I'm in Maine at my family's summer place and therefore in dial-up exile, I catch these two). He had some fascinating stuff to say about the three major lace traditions (Shetland, Orenberg, Estonia) - and was very funny as a speaker. If you knit and have a chance to take a class with him, either on knitting or photography, my recommendation is to jump on it!
WAYWO is a continuing series about what Kossacks are working on {mostly crafts but we're flexible and (at least in my case) inquisitive, so don't be shy about sharing}, usually posted around this time on Sundays. A Yahoo group includes a mailing list to announce when the diary is posted and a schedule of hosts. Feel free to sign up for future weeks or you'll just get me blathering on about genealogy and knitting. (If you don't want to sign up for the Yahoo group {it is only one or two emails a week!}, email me and I'll add you to the schedule.)
What are you working on?
And related questions: is there a skill in your favorite craft that you want to learn that you haven't yet? Or a whole craft that you'd like to try?