Lace

I love knitting lace. I’m not quite sure why. I mean, why should knitting lace fascinate me and keep me interested more than colour work, or cables? I have knit my share of Icelandic and Balkan sweaters in the past and they hold no interest for me now. But lace? Always.

My first foray into the world of lace knitting was a baby blanket I started in early 1985 pending the birth of a nephew who arrived in May. The blanket was not ready. Then it was earmarked for a niece who made her appearance at the end of November. It was still incomplete. In fact, I finished it about a month before my own daughter was born, a whole year after the first intended recipient’s birth. The good part was that I got to keep it.

I made it out of a cheap, baby-green acrylic yarn, the pattern from Beehive Book No. 405, a long out-of-print collection of shawls, both knitted and crocheted. Before I started knitting, I crocheted a shawl from the book which is quite lovely. It consists of a long line of scallops, joined successively by other scallops until it diminishes in size, forming a triangle. On a very long bus ride (Toronto to Sudbury ~5 hours) I parked myself next to an elderly woman (they make the best travelling companions) and crocheted the entire trip. At some point I realized that my “triangle” was getting wider, not narrower, and started to panic. My seat mate thought it was “just lovely” and was no help at all. It turned out I had not been joining the scallops of the previous row as I crocheted new scallops into them, and thus ended up ripping out a whole ball’s worth of yarn. However, I am digressing, as you no doubt have come to expect by now.

Here is my first lace baby blanket:

It’s still quite pretty, especially from a distance. However, the yarn, which used to be baby soft, has gotten kind of stiff and scratchy since 1985. Maybe a turn in the washer and dryer would soften it up again. Since it was my first lace project, it is not error free. At that time, I didn’t know how to correct my mistakes, so I just left them. Like this one:

and this one:

The edging was knitted separately and sewn on. I cannot imagine doing that now, but I do remember doing it then.

I did not knit lace again for many years. In fact, I believe my next lace project didn’t happen until 2009, when I was in Lettuce Knit in Toronto and picked up a skein of Lorna Laces Pearl, a silk-bamboo blend in DK weight in the most gorgeous pink-purple combination of colours. I couldn’t put it down. At all. In fact, I ended up paying $49.00 CAD for it, which is utterly preposterous. I wouldn’t pay that much for a skein of yarn again unless it was threaded with gold. Real gold.

What do you do with yarn that expensive? I couldn’t imagine making something for everyday wear, or that would need to be laundered repeatedly. It was just too precious. My daughter found a simple lace pattern for me on Ravelry which served to show off the sheen of the fibres in a decorative scarf which I wear as an accessory and not to keep warm.

It is lying, by the way, on a lacy bedspread my mother made for me as a wedding gift from worsted weight acrylic. Knitting runs in the family.

I had not yet caught the lace-knitting bug, though. That didn’t happen until the fall of that year when I needed a project for a ball of yarn I had bought in a shop in Picton, Ontario when my husband was composer-in-residence at their annual music festival. (It was also in this shop that I became acquainted with qiviut for the first time.) I fell in love with a ball of 100% merino (Jitterbug by Colinette), determined I would make socks from it. The helpful storekeeper advised me to get some reinforcing yarn for the heels and soles, which I did (Baby Kid Extra by Filatura Di Crosa, a blend of mohair and nylon).

I never did make socks with either yarn. The Jitterbug was too pretty for socks, and the Extra was too nice to hide away as a reinforcer for heels and soles. I embarked on my first Nightsongs shawl by Jane Araújo. It was torture. Sheer torture. At the time I made it, my mother was going through her extended decline into dementia and finally dying. It took a while. The stresses of my personal and professional lives combined with my mother’s illness to make me a total wreck. I remember sitting in front of the wood stove, the only warm place in the living room, staring at my knitting, wondering where I had gone wrong. According to my notes on Ravelry, it only took two weeks to make the scarf, but it felt like an eternity. The pattern required all of my concentration, which was a good thing as it kept me from thinking about what was really on my mind. Eventually I saw how the picture developed, the directions the k2togs took vs the ssks. Whereas I hadn’t really got it before, I did then.

As for the mohair-nylon blend? It became the scarf version of Anisette by Kristeen Griffin-Grimes from Canadian Living online. I later made the full-sized shawl from Shibui Knits Cloud Silk, but I needed to practise first.

Since then, of course, I have knit a lot of lace. I’ve also knit cables and other things with no adornment whatsoever. But it is the lace that keeps me interested in a piece. Always.

The City and the Stars

The title for this post comes from an Isaac Asimov story which has absolutely nothing to do with the subject under discussion, but could be the name of my most recent FO. Oh, wait, that’s exactly what I named it. Heather Anderson asked me if I would test knit her most recent shawl and I gladly responded in the affirmative. I had already knitted two of her shawls in KALs (knit alongs) and I found her instructions to be clear and straightforward. I also think she’s a talented designer, so I said, “Sure.”

The first shawl of Heather’s I made is semi-circular, with increase rows every now and again. I haven’t figured out the math, but instead of the shawl getting steadily bigger, as do triangular and crescent patterns, It merely is given the opportunity to stretch. That sounds weird. I’m not describing it very well. You start out with a garter tab and 12 stitches on your needle. After several rows, you quadruple the number of stitches on your needle, either by yarn overs, knitting front-back, or something else. Continuing on, knit the pattern, then double the number of stitches again. This increase happens one more time, and then you knit until you’re done. Bind off. Wet block. Wear.

Here is the first such shawl I made in this fashion:

It’s a pretty clever trick. That particular garment was knit in Classic Elite Yarns Silky Alpaca Lace on 4 mm. needles. The pattern called for fingering, but I’m really happy with the way it turned out. It’s even warm. However, this entry is not about that shawl.

The test knit I volunteered for is also a semi-circular shawl. Because it was a test, I used the weight of yarn and size of needles specified, but the rest was up to me. Heather’s name for it is City at Night. It’s whimsical, and she chose two shades of blue: dark and darker. I chose Knitpicks Stroll Glimmer in Kestrel and Black. The composition of the yarn is 70% Merino, 25% Nylon, 5% Metallic, the latter what the company calls “stellina”. It sparkles. The main body of the shawl has lace “stars” and the border has a ribbed representation of skyscrapers. In a fit of whimsy, I added a red shiny bead at the tip of each building to warn off low-flying planes. 

Here’s a closeup of the warning lights:

A friend’s response to my description of the buildings being in bas relief was, “If it is knitted out of lambswool, then they are in baa relief.” I wish I’d thought of that!

Finally, the finished garment warming me:

And that’s all I have to say about this one.