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.

I’m past the center part now on the Paisley Shawl, and have finished the dividing section of K2, YOs. I’m pleased with it so far, although it’s tough to see well wadded up as it is on the circular needle. Still, you can make out some details if you squint at this:

See all those little stitch markers?

I’m a big believer in stitch markers in lace. I don’t use a lifeline, but I do mark my repeats – usually every repeat in a large piece. I find that doing so becomes a built-in proofing system. If the stitch count is off beginning the next repeat, I know something went wacky in either the previous one, or in the repeat one row below. I then have the option of ripping back or ripping down just that one repeat. There are complications of course if a decrease spans the juncture point between repeats, but in general this system has served me well. In this case I’m using three different types of markers. Large silver dinglebobs mark the beginning and midpoint of my rounds (the beginning one is especially elaborate). Small red rings mark the quarter points (my pattern is a square, knit center out, so the beginning, mid and quarter points each define a full side repeat set). Tiny silver color split rings mark each motif repeat. The split rings are crafts store specials, bought in a bag of 200 for less than $1.50.

Ripping Down

I know a lot of people are terrified at the prospect of ripping one repeat down. It’s not as scary as it sounds and can usually be done with success on almost anything. Yes, some stitches are harder to rip back, parse out, and reconstruct than others but it’s always worth a try. The alternative is ripping back entire rows. If deconstructing and re-knitting a section works, that saves the effort of redoing an entire row; and if selective ripping doesn’t work the worst that happens is that you’ll need to rip back that entire row anyway. So you can either luck out and save time, or if luck and skill fail you, you end up no worse than you would have been had the effort not been made.

To rip out a bunch of stitches vertically then re-knit them, it’s good to understand the nature of knit stitches and the way they are seated on the needles. I’ve mentioned stitch mounting and twisted stitches before. Recognizing the difference and seating stitches correctly is very important to this process. For starters, when you pick your stitches up after ripping past the broken part, you want to make sure that the survivors are mounted with the leading leg in front:

I start by identifying a good span surrounding the mistake. I don’t want to split a decrease, so I try to begin and end the segment in an area of plain stockinette or garter stitch. I find the corresponding section on my charted pattern, or if there isn’t one – I chart up the repeat and then identify the suspect bit. Note that if you are doing lace, colorwork or textures, this process is vastly aided by being able to work from charts. You can do it if you have prose directions and are thoroughly familiar with your repeat, but it is much harder to identify the stitches in the section that needs to be redone without a stitch by stitch representation of the work.

Once I have identified my bit to be redone both on the needles and on my chart, I isolate it. I’ll knit to just before it, then slide it onto a DPN of the same size as my working needles. This is one of the few times I use needle tips (or rubber bands). I plug the live needle ends before and after my broken section to prevent the balance of the work’s good stitches from leaking off and complicating the problem. Once I’ve got the section isolated, I ladder it back down past my error. I try to end on a row that’s easy to pick up. For example, rows with lots of increases and decreases or cable crossings can play havoc with stitch mounting, so I try to avoid them. The squeamish might like to thread a mini-lifeline through a row of good stitches below the error to make sure they don’t go down further than necessary, but I just take a deep breath and wing it.

When my suspect rows are unraveled, I end up with a bunch of strands suspended ladder-like between the areas of good knitting. I put the last row of good stitches below this mega-ladder back onto the DPN, taking care to mount them correctly. Then I take a second DPN and following the directions on my chart, and using the bottom-most string of my ladder, I re-knit the first suspect row. It’s usually a bit awkward there on the last couple stitches, but care and patience always defeats the problem. I repeat the process with the second row of the suspect area, using the now bottom-most string of my ladder. Sometimes I start each of these make-up rows at the right, working them all as right side rows. Sometimes I do flip the piece over and work every other row as if it were a wrong side row. It mostly depends on whether or not I’m working the whole project in the round or in the flat.

Once all the suspect rows have been re-knit and no ladder strands remain, I uncap the right hand needle and continue with my normal working strand across my "mainstream" row, working across the now rescued stitches. Once those are done, I uncap my left hand needle and continue merrily along my way as if no mistake had dared to intrude itself.

Give this a try the next time you look back several rows and spot a cable crossed katywumpus, or some purls that should have been knit. And if you’re timid, try doing it to a swatch on which you’ve made a deliberate mistake.