Lace knitting charts from 17 and 18 years ago

Cover of Charted Knitting Designs

Anybody interested in test-knitting some lace designs I made? These are patterns I made up and charted about eighteen years ago, but never got around to copy-editing or test-knitting. They are similar to some of Barbara G. Walker's designs in Charted Knitting Designs. They are a tad more symmetrical, since I use twist stitches to balance out the decreases on the other side of the yarnovers.

The patterns are similar to the ones I designed and used in my wall-hanging called Lace Curlicues:



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2010_03_14_12_59_29.pdf (3491 KB)

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Illustrating lace knitting

I posted recently some diagrams I made of Barbara Walker's "Day-flower" lace insertion pattern found in one of her Treasuries stitch collection books.

It took a lot of practice and exploration for me to be able to do that latest, most detailed diagram.

About two years ago I was trying to figure out how to illustrate knitting stitch patterns in the old-school way, where it's all hand-drawn, showing each twist and turn of the knitted yarn. I did develop one method, shown here, that's most suitable for lace knitting, and even for knitted lace, where the shaping is done on each row.

There's a whole lot of idealizing and simplifying involved, but this kind of illustration is at least "topologically" accurate.

The key for me was designing and printing a type of graph paper that represents the approximate 3:4 height-to-width ratio of knitted stitches. Then I had to figure out the rather weird things that yarn overs do to the proportions of the knitted loops.

These illustrations show how an ideal knitted fabric would look when projected on a screen, that is, all of the three-dimensional quality of the fabric is lost. There's no information here about whether stitches are knits or purls nor whether the decreases are right- or left-leaning, only where the yarn overs and decreases are, and how the columns (wales) of stitches slant and flow into each other.

Still, they are much more faithful to the look of the knitted fabric than anything I'd been able to do up to that point. I could even knit from them, but I'm weird that way.

Eventually I started to do this on a computer, like the third illustration here. Still, I like the hand drawn ones because of the roughness. You'll see more examples of this kind of diagram in my Flickr set "Knitting Diagrams."

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr

Double-increase variations

There’s a double increase that’s commonly created by “knit-one-yarnover-knit-one-in the same stitch.”
If you diagram it without indicating the way the threads cross, it looks like this.

Without showing how the threads cross, it’s not clear what structure is being created. So, I thought, what are the possible ways to pull three loops through another loop? I have found three essentially different ways (that don't involve twisting the original loop). Two of them have a reverse side that looks different.
1. First is the knit-one-yarnover-knit-one that’s familiar:

You can create this same structure by performing a purl-one-yarnover-purl-one on a reverse-side row.
2. Another is knit-one-yarnover-purl-one. This is a completely reversible structure. It looks the same and is created the same way on both sides of the fabric:

If you do purl-one-yarnover-knit-one, you get the mirror image of the diagram above.
3. A new (?) one is what I tentatively call a knit-squared. You pull a loop through a loop towards you as in knitting, and while keeping the “legs” of the new loop as separate loops, pull the head of the new loop through the old loop towards you again. I am not sure how to efficiently produce it in hand knitting, but the structure is like this:

These are the three different structures (I don’t count the reverse sides of this as different) I’ve found to “disambiguate” the first diagram.