Lace adventure...

I love cabling.... complicated cables, multicolor cables, thin cables, fat cables.... Cables, i get cables, they make sense, they behave, they scream at you when you make a mistake, and often before you finish the row. They are good communicators.

So far, I've found the opposite is true with lace. The first and only lace I've done is the Wisp. It was very simple, no variations, just YO K2tog and K. And even then, every so often a stitch would just disappear, vanish into thin air. But it didn't really matter with the wisp, I couldn't find any holes, or dropped stitches or any evidence of where the stitches went, so i added a replacement and moved on.

After visiting Lacis I was inspired to give more complicated lace a try. I was delighted to see the Muir scarf on Knitty. And I was just at Muir Woods on my trip, and it is the kind of forest that probably has faeries :-)So i selected a autumn colored silk/reyon yarn, the same yarn as my Wisp scarf. It has wonder drape and a thin gauge. I tried knitting from the chart with no success. I kept losing my place, as all the YO K2tog's, just become a line of o's and /'s.

So I tried the Chart chart system from TECHknitting. Its a Miracle! Genius!

I started again, and this time I got all the way to row 9, still with much concentration, but at least I knew where i was. Then, I counted my stitches, as i've done after every row, and an extra stitch appeared out of nowhere. I was supposed to only have 2 stitches to knit at the end and I had three. I double checked my chart against the original and its correct. I had the right number of stitches when i started the row. Luckily i had used a life line so I pulled out the row and I'll try again.

Its amazing me to me un-smooth this process is for me. Its a conceptual block or something, cause i have no problem doing the individual steps. Its all very strange. Well see how it goes.

To be continued.....