Well, I’ve been working on the edge of the Blue Blossom shawl for a few days now. Man, oh man, is it tedious.
The thing is knitted on sideways and incorporates 3 of the shawl stitches into every repeat. I think that means I am doing 100 or so repeats of the edge (6 rows of about 9 stitches).
I’m trying hard not to stab myself in the eye.
I sat down dutifully today with the Blue Blossom Shawl, a bunch of knitting tools, and my camera. The plan was to document my first attempt at lace surgery a la Romi.
Two problems were immediately apparent. One, the lace pattern shifts every 8 rows, making it difficult to see where the beginning of the round is supposed to be. And two, I didn’t know WHAT THE FUCK I was doing. Once I figured that out, I decided to go with my plan B and thread in a life line and frog back to before all those dropped stitches, only about one pattern repeat. There is no picture of this because, while it’s something that seems simple, it was not actually simple. I thought maybe it would be easier to do a life line if I took out the needles. It wasn’t. So at that point, laid it out on the couch and admired my handiwork:
And then I frogged the shit out of it.
Here’s the pile of stitch markers that fell out of it:
So yeah. That was my knitting day. I didn’t even get a chance to take pictures of Ruffled Baktus. Stupid axial tilt!
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that I need to go back and fix those dropped stitches. Otherwise, this:
is going to bug the crap out of me.
At first I thought I would just put in a life line and rip the whole thing back, but I think I’m going to try Romi’s lace surgery method (LSM) before I do that. Nothing to lose, right? Hopefully it’ll save at least a tiny bit of my sanity.
Remember how I was making slow and painstaking progress on the Blue Blossom Shawl and feeling extremely stressed out by it? Well, I finally got a clue and made myself a crapton of very delicate and very sparkly stitch markers.
I placed them at the beginning of each pattern repeat, and then something just clicked. Suddenly I could see where I was in the pattern and if when I made a mistake I could catch it quickly and easily. I blazed through the remaining repeats of the center section in no time at all and am ready to move on to the next section. For future reference: stitch markers = lace knitting succeed!
So, it turns out that designing lace is really really hard. Especially if you’ve never done anything like it before. I think I’ve gotten a fairly decent start, though. See the references I have gathered?
I think I’m ready to get out some graph paper and start sketching. Have you, reader, designed lace? What references have you used that you found particularly helpful?
I’ve spent a lot of knitting time over the past couple of weeks, poring over circular shawl projects on Ravelry. And stitch dictionaries. And old doily patterns. Because I am crazy. I want to design my own circular shawl, even though I am lace noob. So consumed am I by my passion for this, that I made a special trip to a bookstore to pick up another copy of book I already own (but is in storage). And now, this morning, in the light of day, I see that the yarn I have selected will not work for this project (it’s too stripey, too pooley), so I am shopping for alpaca laceweight (knitpicks has a nice selection, but I think I want something in a natural color). O lace! Thou temptress! Thy siren song enchants, thy holey stitches entwine! Now, if you will excuse me, I have an itch that must be scratched.
