Pride Goeth Before You Mess Up Your Own Lace Pattern

Earlier this month, I posted a photo on my Facebook page (give Treehouse a follow if you aren’t already!) of a lace shawl I was working on, featuring a design of my own tinkering. I was fresh off of finishing up the Wild Vines Blackberry Shawl, which I teased in my previous blog post (that shawl drops on September 1, unless it sells at the public market this weekend!) and feeling VERY confident about my ability to start experimenting more with lace.

I love knitting lace. There are some truly stunning patterns available to knitters out on the internet, such as the lovely Haruni shawl that I’ve knitted up a few times now (that’s the shawl featured on my homepage, modeled by my friend Chloe — that shawl sold years ago, but it’s such a lovely piece I keep coming back to that photo as a sample of my work). While I rarely am in a position to actually wear a triangular shawl myself (they’re not the most practical piece for running around after large farm animals), I love creating them for others and seeing them drape over the shoulders of friends and customers.

Lace, to put it simply, is creating intentional holes in your work and balancing that created open-hole stitch with combining multiple stitches together elsewhere in the row. When combined by people far more artistic than me, these two stitches create intricate and breathtaking designs, crafting whole scenes in yarn. Creating a lace pattern requires an intimate knowledge of how the yarn over works with the knitting of multiple stitches together, as well as a decent bit of math or at least ability to use a grid pattern to ensure you end up with the correct number of stitches still on the needle at the end of the row.

After successfully breaking away from a written pattern for a full shawl to stamp a row of simple leaves on the border of the Wild Vines Blackberry Shawl, I was feeling pretty good about my ability to do that kind of mental math, and launched myself fully into what I called the Feathers Shawl, extending aspects of that basic leaf motif into a feather shape which in my mind was going to look like delicate wings in the final triangle shape.

Except that when I finally cast off the piece and stretched it flat, finally unbunching it from the circular needles where it had been crammed for the past few days… it wasn’t right.

My math did not math.

My mental grid of yarn overs and knit two togethers didn’t actually work outside of the confines of my brain.

And now I had a bunchy sort of almond-shaped lump of stitches that wasn’t actually wearable. Full credit to my husband who tried to convince me that the extra lump at the top of the shawl (which should have been the perfectly flat line of the triangle) was “practical” and “ergonomic” and “reminiscent of something someone would wear in the 1700s.”

I frogged it. That’s knitter parlance for “unwound the whole thing and put it back into a yarn ball to try again someday.”

And I figured out my problem… I think. I’m not fully sure, to be honest. Lace continues to be a puzzle. But every mistake, no matter how costly (this one was to the tune of 12 hours of work) gets me closer to solving it. And I’ve already started using the recovered yarn in another project… because I’m never down for long.