When we last saw our Intrepid Knitter in early December, she had managed to cast on and begin knitting Herbert Niebling’s Lyra circular lace pattern, using size 000 needles and size 100 tatting thread.
Since then... well, there have been set backs, December business, and things have changed.
I had decided to use size 000, 1.5 mm needles because that’s the smallest sized circular needle which is manufactured, I suppose because no manufacturer has managed to get a small enough join between the needle tips and the flexible cable part.* As I got about 40 rounds into the pattern, though, I was thinking that the size 100 thread was too small for the 000 needles.
*I have made my own 6-0, .75 mm lace needles using steel wire from the hardware store, adding points with a grinder/knife sharpener and emery cloth. The wire is so flexible that one doesn’t need a join. However I did not want to try knitting a pattern as difficult as Lyra on such small needles, at least not yet.
The problem was the stitches were too fine against the loop size to have any definition and the patterning was "lost in space" — plus it was extremely difficult to see just WTF I had just knit!
I was weighing my options — finishing the piece with the size 100 thread, pulling the needles and starting over — when the decision was made for me or, at least, made necessary by my own limitations.
I am a verbal, rather than visually, based person. I prefer instructions made in words, perhaps supplemented with diagrams (which is why I can decipher computer manuals). Because I am a verbal person, I translated the pattern for Lyra from its chart form into words. It’s just too easy for me to confuse one symbol for another. I was proofreading a section of the instructions against the chart as I waited for Elder Son to get out of a dental appointment when I realized that my verbal-based mind had done precisely what I feared it would do if I tried to knit directly from the chart: in typing out the pattern, I had swapped left-slant (slip 1, knit 1, pass slipped stitch over; K1S1PSSO) for right-slant (knit two together, K2T) decreases. The decision was made. When I got home I pulled the needles from the stitches, then walked to a near-by knitting and crafts store for a different thread. And I found what may be the ultimate lace knitting thread: Gutermann hand quilting thread. Because the thread is waxed and slightly stiff, it holds the loops — so if you drop a stitch, or the needles slip out, it’s no big deal as the stitches don’t immediately unravel.
I don’t have to take this precaution with the Gutermann thread — but for others who may want to try knitting on smaller needles with finer thread (as I ultimately will do when I try Lyra on 6-0 needles and size 100 thread), the most important rule is one stitch at a time: with very fine thread, it is very, very easy to drop a stitch if you are trying to handle more than one at once, such as with a K2T. Additional, fine cotton threads have very little natural elasticity so it can be very difficult to get one’s needle through both loops; often you’ll miss one loop. Instead — and it’s a little time consuming, but better than losing a stitch and not realizing it until 5 rounds later when you’ll have a major reconstruction job which can take hours to accomplish — I’ll knit the stitch, pass it back to the left needle, pass the next stitch over the knitting stitch, then pass the stitch back to the right needle. You get a right slant decrease with no danger of dropping a stitch.
A second trick is the "life-line" (no, this is not Who Wants To Be A Millionaire). Very simply, one runs a contrasting-color line of thread through all the stitches of a round — one of the plain-stitched rounds. Sometimes disasters happen — like the time the cable of my circular needle separated from the point and snapped the knitting thread; sometimes you make a major error that can not be corrected any way but by pulling out multiple rows. With lace knitting, though, with all the yarn-overs and decreases and increases, it's very difficult to eyeball just which row any stitch is in. With the life-line, you can go back to a set place and know that all the unraveling will stop at one row.
Life-lines are very time-consuming, as one must carefully run a sewing needle between the knitting needle and working stitches without going through the knitting thread. Thus, when using life-lines I only put them in right before a pattern shift — that way I know if I make a major dumb-ass mistake in reading the pattern, I can just pull out the new section.
Most mistakes, though, are of a smaller scale, and after one discovers where one has fucked up (and you will fuck up, no matter how anal you are), one can take the proper remedy. Of course, one must first figure out exactly where you fucked up, and why you have too many, or too few, stitches.
If you are short a stitch or more, the first thing to do is look for dropped stitches — because if you did drop a stitch and don’t find it right away, it will slip down farther and farther as you look for the error in other places. It’s not likely that it’s a dropped stitch, but that’s always the first thing to look for.
The likeliest reason for a missing stitch, though, is a missed yarn over. Go over the instructions for the previous row, and see if you missed one — yarn-overs are easy to add after-the-fact. If it’s not a missing yarn over, then you probably put in one too many decreases somewhere. If you put in too many decreases, you can either drop the stitch down to the last pattern row and correct (depending on the pattern, that may be the better option), or just add a stitch at the appropriate spot in the current row. And sometimes you just can’t figure out what the fuck you did wrong — and if you can’t figure it out, then its probably no big whoop and you can just add a stitch, as with a too-many-decreases fuck up.
If you are over a stitch or more, there are three places to look: (1) too many yarn overs (just drop the excess stitches — the tension will even out through the washing and blocking of the piece), (2) you missed a decrease in a previous row (usually you can just add the decrease to the current row, making sure it slants the right way), or (3) when doing a S1K1PSSO, you forgot to pass over the slipped stitch (either drop down a row and correct, or do the pass-over in the current row). If you're correcting just a stitch it's pretty easy to just drop it down a couple of rows, make the correction, and use a crochet hook to take it back up to the current row.
However, sometimes the fuck-up is of a nature where you really do need to re-do a small section a few rows back — like I did last night. Every lace pattern has one or more type of openwork filler pattern which is worked repetitively over several stitches and rows. In Lyra it’s the stitch pattern shown above: [K2T, 2 y/o, S1K1PSSO], [K2T, 2 y/o, S1K1PSSO], which will be off-set in the next pattern round. The danger in these filler sections, though, is one can run on auto-pilot and not notice that one has goofed, over multiple stitches, until the pattern doesn’t work correctly in the subsequent pattern round.
When that happens, one must proceed more carefully. Get out a spare set of double-pointed needles, weave them through one pattern repeat a row down, and pull the working thread. Repeat until you make it down to and have pulled out the fucked-up stitches. As you work you way down, pull the loose working threads out of the way and secure — here you can see that I've wrapped the thread around the main needles; if the mistake is too far down, you'll have to perform lace surgery.
I prefer to work one pattern repeat at a time — others might pull out the whole fucked-up section. In this case, the mistake extended over two sets of [K2T, 2 y/o, S1K1PSSO] pattern repeats, so I repeated the above exercise over the next set which also changed the stitch count a bit on the following section of the pattern — another 5 stitches or so.
By the end of a couple of hours (yes, it can take that long to hunt down the error, then carefully reconstruct the section), I was back on track and ready to forge ahead.
Although I have titled this series "Annals of Anality", I've learned through several lace projects that perfection is impossible (unless one wants to end up like the Anal Retentive Chef). What may appear to you a glaring error that ruins the whole exercise likely will not be seen by anyone not studying the piece, unless you point it out. Indeed, eventually even you will have trouble finding it — there's a major screw up in my first major piece of knit lace, Marianne Kinzel's Tudor Rose pattern that I have to search for these days.
I'm now at row 119 of 180 rows; each round is 808 stitches so it takes a while to get through a round. If anyone else would like to try knitting Lyra, the chart is available at Lacis (about half-way down the page).
There will be at least one more diary in this series — if not more. Until next time.