Contest Time!

Because I am evil and because I believe lace-knitting misery deserves company, I invite you to enter a drawing for 2 sneaky little balls of KARABELLA GOSSAMER in a particularly devious shade of purple.

OCEAN BREEZES recommends KARABELLA GOSSAMER as the yarn of choice for the SEA FOAM scarf and we all know how that ended up for me. Maybe you'll be luckier. Probably you're a better lace-knitter than yours truly. Definitely we'll be dying to see the results.

Just send me an email right here with KG in the subject header and I'll announce the winner on Monday morning.

Beware, knitters: ahead lies a giant frog pond!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Wherein I Get My Butt Kicked

I'm almost 58 years old and I allowed an ounce of mohair to kick my butt clear across the state of New Jersey.

And I'm still not sure exactly how it happened. I mean, I still have all my faculties. I know my way around US9 Knit Picks Options and a ball of Karabella Gossamer. I've knitted with mohair before. I know the drill.

I can't even say the pattern is difficult because it isn't. Sea Foam is fairly common and Sheryl Thies presents a lovely variation in OCEAN BREEZES. There's no reason I should have had to frog three times and then abandon ship quicker than First Class abandoned the Titanic.

Okay, so I did one really stupid thing. I wrote up a little cheat sheet so I could keep the pattern in front of me and I made a wee mistake. (I left out two YOs . . . don't ask.) Which definitely screwed me up. But it's more than that. It's some basic deficiency in my character that turns me into a whimpering, snarling, psychotic mess by the time the first pattern repeat is finished.

I mean, I bailed on Branching Out and nobody bails on Branching Out. A five year old could knit Branching Out.

I love lace. I stand in awe of knitters who turn out yard after yard of whisper-fine lace. Lace-knitting is as close to magic as I'm ever likely to come. But I hate knitting it. Remember how much Nancy hates knitting socks? That's me with lace. My shoulders tense up as soon as I cast on. By the end of the first row, those shoulders are up around my ears. That mushy messy lump of fabric that may or may not block into something fabulous makes my heart beat faster . . . and not in a good way. In a panic attack kind of way. Invariably I lose count or drop a stitch or do something idiotic to throw a monkey wrench into the works and I walk away one more time.

To me, knitting lace is the fiber equivalent of root canal without anaesthetic. Pure torture. So why, I ask you, am I incapable of turning away from it? I actually made a Charlotte (with Ritratto instead of Koigu) late last year (and forgot to photograph it in my Christmas rush) but I'm not sure that counts as real lace. (Nobody has troubles with Charlotte. Nobody but me, that is.)

I hate not being able to do something. I want, just once, to knit a beautiful piece of lace and then walk away from it, back into my happy land of swirling cables and sturdy rectangles.

Hope really does spring eternal.

Your lifelines saved my life...

...or at least my sanity! Here is the beginning of my Mobius Scarf from Arctic Lace. See the white strings? Those are my dental floss lifelines. I've used them twice already and I can't thank all of you enough for the brilliant suggestion! I put them in every eight rows (on the straight garter stitch row) because that's the full pattern. I keep three in at a time because that seems like a magic number. The dental floss pulls out really smoothly when I'm ready to use it for the next lifeline.


The fact that I've needed those amazing lifelines tells you something about how well I'm doing with lace knitting. Clearly my powers of concentration stink. I think I have the pattern pretty well under control and then all of a sudden I'm short a stitch. I carefully tink back to the beginning of the row and I'm still short a stitch. I examine my stitches through a magnifying glass and I'm still short a stitch so then I curse and rip back to the lifeline. I don't foresee alot of lace in my future.


A lace question: this scarf isn't as open and airy as I thought it would be from the photo in Arctic Lace. Would moving from Size 3 needles to Size 5 needles make it more the way I want it? Or would it just look stupid? (Please don't tell me to knit a swatch and see; that's just torture for me.) Or can I stretch it enough when I block it to make it lacier? I'm using Kraemer Sterling Silk and Silver yarn.

Thank you all again for throwing me the lifelines!

First Encounter with Lace

The commissioned scarf is finished. The weather is heating up—finally. Hockey season is almost over. I needed a new knitting project that factored in all of the above.

“Lace!” I thought. I have a) the pretty Kraemer Sterling Silk and Silver yarn, and b) the incredibly expensive Quiviuk I bought in Banff. I figured I would do a practice scarf with the Kraemer Sterling so I don’t mess up the incredibly expensive Quiviuk.



I got out my newly acquired copy of Arctic Lace (which you wonderful RTY folks recommended) and really applied myself to it. What a great book! It has the best instructions for doing a long tail cast-on I’ve ever seen. The explanations of lace stitches are terrific. The patterns are easy to read.

Even more amazing, Arctic Lace author Donna Druchunas convinced me to do swatches. I NEVER do swatches. I’m one of those I-refuse-to-do-any-knitting-that-doesn’t-contribute-directly-to-the-project’s-progress knitters. If I make mistakes, that’s what frogging is for. However, Ms. Druchunas’ arguments for swatches were so persuasive that I followed her progression almost to the letter.

Here’s the first swatch, knitted with worsted weight wool on size 7 needles in a simple pattern. But I was proud of it.



Then I graduated to the Kraemer Sterling yarn I would really use and did a more complicated swatch on size 3 needles. (Okay, I skipped the size 5 needles I was supposed to use.). I got this one right too. You will notice that I never actually finish the swatches. Ms. Druchunas’ powers of persuasion were powerful but not quite up to that.



I highly recommend swatching if you haven’t knitted lace before. It made me familiar with the look of the stitches, with reading the pattern, and how the different stitches worked on top of each other.

Most important, I learned that lace knitting requires TOTAL CONCENTRATION. I could not watch a hockey game and knit; I inevitably lost my place. I have started over with my lace project (the Möbius Scarf, only not as wide, in Arctic Lace) three times because either the Penguins or the Red Wings scored at inopportune moments in the pattern.

Fortunately, it is now baseball season. My DH is a die-hard Yankees fan and likes to have me keep him company when he’s engrossed in a game on television. I find watching baseball less exciting than watching grass grow so lace knitting is perfect. I don’t get distracted no matter how loudly he admonishes Derek Jeter to “hit the ball!” because I just don’t care what Derek Jeter does. I don’t even think he’s good eye candy. I prefer Hideki Matsui personally. That’s totally irrelevant to this blog and I don’t know why I even mentioned it.

Back to lace. Here’s my question: how do you pick up stitches in a lace pattern after you rip out mistakes? It’s the one thing I can’t figure out so I keep having to frog the whole darned project back to the garter stitch border when I make a mistake. Is there a trick or do I just have to use trial and error and hard experience?