Lace Knitting: An Introduction

The feature image showcases a creation by knitter Maiden Brooklyn, who lists some of her work at Craftsy.com. The knitting pattern for the shawl featured above can be downloaded here.

Lace knitting may just be considered as the pinnacle of knitting because of its sophistication over other techniques.

Lace knitting is often done by knitters who well have a couple of months or years practice and an extended exposure to the craft. With all of these concepts, you may be conscious that it really is not the easiest thing to do, but it is of course worth a try. Although the process of lace knitting may be complicated and the time needed to finish up one is not short, but the results are pretty much very rewarding.

Lace knitting is deemed to be complex because typical woven textile cannot have intended holes on them. Eyelet patterns are holes that only make up a tiny fraction of the entire fabric and most of the times isolated into groups of clusters. Knitted laces are naturally elastic and stretchy. This is done in so that it can fit to whatever they are draped on. As a consequence, these garments need to be cared for they tend to overstretch due to prolonged usage.

The holes are introduced to the fabric by coupling a yarn-over an active stitch to an adjacent decrease. If the so-called decrease heads the yarn-over, it should slant to the right but if the decrease is behind the yarn-over, the stitch should slant to the left. These intended slants draw the fabric away thus opening up a hole. Pairing the decrease with the yarn-over keeps the count of the stitches more constant.

However, depending on your knitting skills, some expert knitters separate the decrease from the yarn-over. Separating the two causes a certain tilt of the stitches to lean towards the decrease creating a look which mimics the veins of a leaf. Positioning the holes to create symmetrically correct patterns may be hard; however, a knitter can draw patterned holes on a graphing paper as a guide. Common patterns that are outlined are flowers, leaves, rosettes, and ferns

Lace knitting is not as superior as other famous counterpart such as bobbin lace and needle lace which takes more time to produce. However, knitted laces are softer and very much faster to make than its known competitors. It may be the ultimate manifestation of knitting for now, but it is certainly for sure that more of them are expected to come and take over the world of knitting!