The knitted-lace chart dilemma: To be symmetrical or to list to port?

I have just finished test knitting a shawl by the exquisite Mary-Anne Mace. This is the second garment I have had the honour to test for her, the first being the nuppy Minarets and Lace shawl which shows up in another post here. In my view, she is a wonderful designer. I love her creations. Even before I discovered her on Raverly, I fell in love with Regenerate, a triangular shawl she conceived of while watching the renewal of nature following the terrible devastation of the September, 2010 earthquakes in New Zealand. When I saw she had another shawl ready for test knitting, I quickly volunteered my services.

I’m afraid that as a test knitter, I’m a bit of a pain in the ass. I don’t stop at finding typos and errors in the pattern; I try to find easier ways to explain to other knitters how to get the desired results. It is my philosophy that a pattern should be made easy enough for even the stupidest person to follow. That doesn’t mean the knitter can be a beginner. There are often techniques (like nupps) that require a fair bit of experience. It’s just that even an experienced knitter can become confused when instructions are not perfectly clear, or when an abbreviation is not explained fully or is similar to something else or simply doesn’t seem to make intuitive sense. I bring these things up and try to clarify them so that the knitting experience is as stress free as possible.

Having said all that, I now move on to the “meat” of the matter: the lace chart. When I learned to knit, there were no lace charts in knitting patterns; at least, not in the patterns I learned from. Most of the knitting books I still have from that era have every line written out in full, with asterisks setting off repeated parts. They are very wordy. Because the type is often quite small (needing to accommodate all those words and abbreviations), they are also hard on the eyes and it is easy to jump from one line to another and make mistakes. Until the pattern is established, you also have no idea what your lace will look like. Lace charts are a much, much better innovation. I am mystified as to why it took so long for publishers to include them in knitting patterns, since designers must have used charts to plan out their lace in the first place. However, that was then and this is now.

Now we have beautiful, detailed charts showing the directions of k2tog and ssk stitches, Os for yos, plain for knit, dotted or dashed for purl. It is the difference between a well-drawn road map with landmarks and a sheet of written instructions telling you to drive 12 km, then turn right at County Road 14. I would prefer to have the map so I can see where I’m going.

When one of my colleagues was pregnant with her first child, I made a baby blanket from a rather ancient book (about which I have already spoken in this blog). It consisted of a square in the middle, surrounded by an edging of four strips with mitred corners sewn on after. The instructions took two whole pages and buckets of words, words, words. Thus:

The central part consisted of a stitch pattern which drove me crazy until I had ripped out several times.

It shouldn’t have been difficult. But it was. After I finally got the hang of it, it turned out great.

It was, however, the lace edging which turned out to be extremely challenging. After all, there are a page and-a-half of closely-typed instructions. I ended up drawing myself a chart so I could see what I was doing. It was just pencil on graph paper, but it sufficed. This is what I was charting.

What I noticed as I drew my chart, is that the repeats for the pattern do not occur at the same place on every line. For example:

Row 5: p2tog, p2, k2tog, yo, p2, *k1, yo, k5, yo, k2tog, p1, ssk, p1, k2tog, p1, ssk, yo, k5, yo, k1, p2, k2tog, yo, p2. Repeat from * 5 times, p2 tog.
Row 6: purl the purls and knit the knits (it doesn’t say that, but that’s basically what it is)
Row 7: p2tog, p1, *yo, ssk, p2, k1, yo, k7, yo, ssk, p1, ssk, yo, k7, yo, k1, p2. Repeat from * 5 times. yo, ssk, p1, p2tog.

So, just from those three lines above, if you were to draw a chart, you would see that Row 5 begins its pattern repeat after the seventh stitch; Row 7 begins after the second. That makes sense when you are reading each line without regard to the “big” picture, but if you were charting it, you would draw a red box around the section to be repeated, with the different bits (in this case, the mitring edges) on either side. In the case where the WS is all purled, it would even make sense to start your box at the very beginning of your motif that repeats. But the wrong side of this fabric is not mindlessly purled. It is written out, too. Here’s the row I glossed over:

Row 6: k3, p2, k2, *p9, k1, (p1, k1) twice, p9, k2, p2, k2. Repeat from * 5 times, k1.

Remember, when charting that, you’re reading from left to right now, and of course all the purls and knits will be reversed so that the chart presents the RS only. Since the pattern is symmetrical, it makes sense to me to draw the red box around it so that when you read the chart from either direction, you’ll get the same number of stitches to the centre of the motif. So, for that line of instructions above, Row 6, I would have rewritten it thus: k3, p1, *p1, k2, p9, k1, (p1, k1) twice, p9, k2, p1. Repeat from * 5 times, p1, k3. (I actually had to draw it out on graph paper to see where I needed to put those asterisks.) That way you have a perfectly symmetrical motif.

Mary-Anne’s pattern was perfectly symmetrical. There was lace on both right and wrong sides of the fabric, which meant that, once you figured out which way to do the purling equivalents of k2togs and ssks on the WS, if you put your stitch markers smack dab in the middle of the no-man’s land between motifs, you had the same number of stitches to count on either side. That is exactly what I did. But that isn’t what Mary-Anne did. She had drawn  her box so that it began with the beginning of the motif on the RS. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be an issue for me. But there was lace making going on on the WS of the fabric, which meant that when I read the chart from left to right, it was not the same as the right side number-of-stitches-wise. This was confusing because just looking at the chart, the symmetry was so evident! So I ignored her red box and did my own thing. But remember, this was a test knit. I was supposed to be doing what the designer instructed to see if it worked. In my opinion, it did not work. My method worked better. But she wanted to use her method because she was following this particular guide.

So in the end, I suppose we agreed to disagree. When I see a symmetrical chart, I will automatically start counting my repeat from the equal division between the two motifs, especially if the pattern is charted on both right and wrong sides. So there.