CORNERING
I did the first corner last night. It worked out more or less as I expected. My last motif ended within a stitch or two of the corner (I think I overlooked a couple of the K2tog-psso spots, otherwise it would have ended up exact). I then worked an extra repeat squashed into the three cornermost stitches, fudging the attachment points. You can see that the base of that repeat is slightly thickened, but that’s not very obvious.
The squish-stretch around the corner accounts for the oddly leggy appearance of the double yarn over column. Most of that should even out in blocking. Now all that’s left to do is to carry on and finish the remaining 2.75 sides. Maybe on the next lacy project I knit I’ll work out how to do mitered corners. That sounds like fun, too.
More questions:
Why do you do the K2tog-psso bit when joining?
Because the stitches are wider than the rows are tall, and I’m working my edging perpendicular to the direction in which the body was knit (that was done center-out). I need to even out that ratio just a tad as I go along. If I were to join my edging with K2s only (remember, that means one edging stitch joined to one body stitch) the edging would be more stretched around the perimeter and I’d get more cupping of the interior piece. Another way to even everything out is to knit the functional equivalent of short-rows in the edging, making free rows every now and again that aren’t attached to the body. I do this if the edging is VERY wide or unstretchy compared to the body, but it wasn’t necessary for this little bit.
What makes a hand-dyed multicolor yarn work in a lace project?
I wish I could say that I know a flat-out answer to this one. All I can do is report on what I look for. First, the color set should be tonally close, like an impressionist’s palette. Big contrast makes it much more difficult. Second, (surveying my scars from the Birds Eye experiment), the color has to take the center stage, not the lacy pattern. I now look for something that has acres of ground punctuated by lacy bits if I’m using a multicolor. And third, the more broken the color patterning or shorter the repeat, the more it fights with the texture pattern. This particular skein sort of pooled a bit. Stripers pool even more so. Too much pooling however can overwhelm any pattern. But even those yarns can be tamed. The feather and fan or old shale variants are especially forgiving, and can often be used for savagely aggressive multicolors that fight with any other texture.
Finally for hand-dyeds of all gauges, skeins with very short color splotches that make a tweedy appearance when knit up are the most difficult to use in combo with a texture pattern. Those I prefer to use either in plain stockinette, or in combo with an coordinating or accent color.
Do you like garter stitch based lacy patterns?
To be truthful, I prefer the look of a stockinette ground for solid color lacy work. But garter works well for this particular pattern and with this multicolor yarn. Garter stitch breaks up pooling colors and tames hand-dyed yarns because the garter ridges introduce the color of a later row into a previous one, blurring the boundaries between hues.
EDGING UP
Here’s the final graph and directions for my edging to complement the Paisley Shawl from Interweave Knits, Spring 2005 edition. I haven’t worked out how to do the corners yet, but I suspect I’ll fudge them, working the equivalent of an extra repeat of the chart in each corner. I’ll start several stitches before each corner, working more than one attachment point into one stitch of the shawl body.
Simple Edging for Paisley Shawl
Work Paisley Shawl as directed until after the final row of the paisley lace border, just before the directions for the picot edging begin . You will have 156 stitches per quarter, as described. DO NOT BREAK OFF THE YARN.
The edging will be worked back and forth flat, using a DPN of the same size as your circular needle and the left hand needle tip of that circular. Place a needle stopper or rubber band on the right hand tip of your circular needle to avoid inopportune “stitch leakage” off the bottom of your circ as you work the edging.
Using the DPN, the active yarn strand and the half-hitch cast on, cast on 8 stitches. Avoid leaving a large skip between the circ and the DPN by taking care to make the first stitch immediately adjacent to the last stitch knit normally on your circular needle.
Flip the work over and knit the 8 stitches you just cast on. Flip the work over again and begin following the chart below at Row #1.
Note that at the end of every wrong-side row you will be working an attachment point. The attachments on Rows 2, 4, 8, and 10 are done as SSKs, with the first stitch of the SSK being the last stitch of the edging, and the second being a single active stitch of the shawl’s body. The attachments on Rows 6 and 12 are done by slipping the last stitch of the edging, knitting two stitches of the shawl body together, and passing the slipped stitch over the K2tog.
The result:
Each sawtooth has a quad flower on it, and the double row of eyelets at the base of the trim echoes the four double column of eyelets that follow the diagonal lines from the shawl’s center to the four corners. Plus the edging is about half the width of the paisley lace band that’s just inside it, so the proportions work well. This edging also knits up quite quickly. Last night I was able to do most (but not all) of Side #1. Based on yarn consumption, I should have enough to finish. Perhaps even have a little bit left over.
Enjoy!
PAISLEY EDGING
After much noodling, doodling, and swatching, here’s the result. I didn’t bother taking photos of every generation of interim swatches. All that rejection is just too depressing. I’m using the tail end off the outside of my yarn ball to work my experiments. Since I need to be frugal, I’ve been ripping back the rejects as I go.
One important thing to note is the difference in the quad eyelet motif. I thought about it some more as I sat in traffic during yesterday morning’s commute. In the shawl body, that motif is presented in plain old north-south orientation, with the rows running horizontally. The motif spans six rows and begins with a single eyelet on the first. In the edging, the repeat is presented on the bias. The motif wouldn’t show in the same orientation. Plus the extra stitches added to form the repeat skew the stitch count. Therefore working the repeat as shown yesterday would not make a quad-eyelet design comparable to the one in the body. If stitch placement were adjusted, it would make a square of eyelets instead of a diamond. Unadjusted as is, it would make a snaky looking blob of eyelets.
Sure enough, by the time I was finally able to swatch tonight that all became painfully obvious. So I began playing. If you look at the body at a 45-degree angle, the eyelets appear as two stacked groups of two. If I were to work them that way perhaps when the edging was viewed in its natural orientation, the eyelets would resemble the ones in the body.
Again, sure enough it worked exactly that way. Working two right side rows with (YO, K2tog)2x produced the proper appearance. But then I had the problem of where to place that repeating unit. How close could I put it to the right hand YO columns before it lost its integrity? On which two right side rows should the unit be worked?
You guessed it. More swatching. You can see some of my spurious results here, with the last complete dag (marked with the arrow) being the one with the most optimal placement:
And here’s the final graph.
Now to go back to the shawl and begin to work the thing onto the live stitches around the edge. More on that tomorrow, guaranteed!
DESIGNING SIMPLE LACE
It was pretty much guaranteed to happen. I went through the various lace books on my shelf, but didn’t find a pattern that fit my specs for the Paisley Shawl edging. So I’ll resort to drafting out one of my own.
Now I don’t claim to be any more than a rank beginner at this sort of thing, but I think I’ve grokked a couple of the fundamentals. The books that have helped me most in learning lace construction are:
- Lewis, Susanna. Knitting Lace. Taunton Press (Newton, CT), 1992.
- Miller, Sharon. Heirloom Knitting. Shetland Times (Lerwick, UK), 2002.
- Stove, Margaret. Creating Original Hand-Knitted Lace. Lacis Publications, (California), 1995.
To start, I’m contemplating either a saw-tooth or triangle edge piece, of indeterminant width (but probably not too wide, in order to conserve yarn). I want to put the quad-eyelet flower motif on it. I want the repeat to be a multiple of 12 rows.
Let’s start with the eyelet:
Not too tough. Just a couple of YOs and K2togs, spanning six rows – three of which are purled to make the garter stitch ground.
Now let’s look at a simple sawtooth and triangle. Sawtooth edgings are simple because they’re built by adding stitches somewhere on the row, usually at the rate of one every other row. When the edging is deep enough, the stitches at one side are bound off and the total stitch count is returned to the original number. Here’s a minimal 12-row sawtooth, starting with 5 stitches
It starts with a cast-on of five stitches (not shown), then adds one stitch per odd numbered row. I stuck these increases in a column and made them eyelet-forming YOs, but they really could occur anywhere on the row, including at the very end and could be M1s or another increase that doesn’t make a hole. So long as each odd numbered row adds one stitch, the thing will widen appropriately. On Row 12 I bind off six stitches, returning the count to the original five cast on, in preparation for the following Row 1. The blue square is the last loop created by the bind-off conga chain, and is blue to remind me that I need to bind off until four live stitches plus the one formed by the bind off itself remain.
I’ve also charted these as all knits, but they could be anything, and anything can be plopped onto the base pattern. That includes the quad-eyelet, or other patterning. The whole thing can also be made wider by working some kind of vertical insertion strip at the right, prior to commencing the stitches of this mini-chart. For example, it’s common to increase the width of an edging by adding a column of faggotting, or a cable or lace insertion there.
Here’s a very 12-row triangle edging. It’s slightly more complicated because all the decreases needed to create the points aren’t lumped together and done on the final row:
Again, the increases and decreases can occur anywhere in the row. To make comparisons easier, I’ve included the column of YOs as a design feature in both this and the sawtooth. But running them the entire length of the repeat means I would be adding a stitch on the "downhill" side, when I need to be taking one away to make the basic shaping. Therefore I’ve put two decreases on Rows 7, 9 and 11. The first one cancels out the addition of the stitch created by the YO (placed near the YOs for reasoning clarity only, in fact they could go anywhere on the row). The second one forms the triangle’s shape.
I could make the triangle steeper by changing the rate of increase, either by doing something interesting on EVERY row instead of every other row. (That’s one of the discriminators that marks the difference between true lace knitting and lacy knitting. Knit lace mavens would say that these simple examples are properly termed lacy knitting, and not lace knitting.) Or I could add additional YOs, or use double YOs. The possibilities are endless.
Here are the sawtooth and the simple triangle, tarted up with the garter stitch main texture and the quad-eyelet. I’ll start by swatching these, then see if I want something more demonstrative and lacier, or plainer. I’ll also judge width. Narrower might be tough without compromising the space I need to show the eyelets, but wider is VERY easy. If I want to make my life easy I can use any texture pattern with a 3 row, 4 row, 6 row or 12 row repeat to stretch my edging wider. I could use patterns with different row counts, too, but that would make tracking where I am in the thing just a bit harder.
WEDNESDAY UPDATE:?
These two pattern charts will NOT make a nice, neat quad eyelet motif. Explorations of why and a correction are posted in tomorrow’s entry.
String-Or-Nothing 