Lace Knitting: some patterns and resources for you

Many of the designs that y’all seem to gravitate toward, especially during the summer months, contain lots of knitted lace.  Lace is fun to work, allows the use of large needles with thin yarn (thus increasing the proverbial bang for the buck), and looks stunning even in its simplest form of yarn-overs (YOs), knit-two-togethers (K2tog), and slip-slip-knits (SSK).

Pervenche Poncho

Most of my recent designs, many of which Rosanne is now carrying in the shop, are filled with YOs, K2tog, and SSK … placed in just the right spots to create pictures, themes or graphic designs.  My Pervenche Poncho (which used about 1-1/2 skeins of Tofutsies), is a great example of how the positioning of YOs, k2tog, and ssk creates a picture … or a theme.  Here the theme is a garden of wild-flowers (“pervenche” is French for periwinkles).

Sorcha’s Shawl (uses 3 skeins of Kudo)

Or my Sorcha’s Shawl, which is a riot of color and texture.  Cables interspersed with graphic lines and diagonals highlight the gorgeous multi-color yarn.  This is a little heavier shawl than many of my designs as it is knit with Plymouth’s Kudo, a worsted-weight cotton-silk-rayon blend. With the YOs and cotton-blend, this poncho is cool in the heat but keeps the wearer warm in a/c … a great bonus when you live in the South and its 100 degree days.

My latest lace design, Roisin’s Garden Shawl, is a shawlette that uses two skeins of Ultra Pima.  This shawlette is shaped with short rows, creating a slightly curved shawl that can be worn many different ways.  With it’s rosebud lace, cables creating a rose-lattice and the rose-leaf fringe, this shawlette (which blocks out to a 60″ x 16″ curved shawl), is a fun exercise in lace knitting.

So, do you WANT to try lace knitting?  Here are some of the best books to get you started …

• Abbey, Barbara – Barbara Abbey’s Knitting Laceis mentioned by Eizabeth Zimmermann as being THE lace encyclopedia to own.  Although these lace designs are gorgeous, this book was written before the advent of charts, so all the directions are written row by row. Definitely a book to have on your shelves and worth “translating” to chart form for those of you who prefer a graphic presentation.
• Lewis, Susanna E. – Knitting Lace: A Workshop with Patterns and Projects is more than just a stitchionary of lace patterns.  Lewis came across a knitted sampler and proceeded to recreate each block for this book.  But not satisfied with just recreating the blocks, she imparts her lace-creating knowledge and design details for the designer.  If you want to use lace in knitting, this is the book to get!
• Stove, Margaret — Both her Creating Original Hand-knitted Lace and her Wrapped in Lace: Knitted Heiloom Designs from Around the Worldare classic resources for learning to knit lace. Her illustrations and explanations are wonderfully clear and her designs (both charted and row-by-row) are gorgeous!
• Waterman, Martha – Traditional Knitted and Lace Shawls includes history, stitch patterns and designs for creating various types of traditional shawls.

Next week I’ll do a post with tips and tricks and techniques that will help you along the lace-knitting adventure.