Ok, so perhaps I am not as good at knitting as I thought. Many months ago, my mom requested that I knit her a scarf. We picked out Julie Hoover’s Tissé, a beautiful herringbone pattern in lace weight yarn. I have never knit herringbone, and I have never knit with lace weight before, but I figured it couldn’t be that bad. After several months of trying, I am here to tell you: it is impossible for me. My yarn slips off my needles. I can’t for the life of me read my knitting, so I can’t tell if I’ve made a mistake until several rows down the line. And perhaps worst of all, I can’t seem to reliably fix my mistakes. I don’t know if it’s the yarn, or the stitch pattern, but every row is a gamble to see if I am going to end up with the right number of stitches at the end.
After tinking back too many times to count, frogging and starting over for the second time yesterday, I realized that I think I just need to get a little better before I knit this one. It’s a heartbreak, because the pattern is lovely, and my mom would love it. But I would lose my mind if I had to fight with this for the next several months. So. I picked out an easier pattern and hopefully my mom can have a completed scarf before next year (I’m not even exaggerating at this point).
Oceana by Janina Kallio
I chose Oceana by Jannina Kallio. It is a laceweight scarf with a decent amount of garter and a simple eyelet lace panel interspersed throughout.
I have knit a complete lace panel and am well into a garter section, and this seems immensely more achievable. I have, however, realized that I might have to do a little shopping for some stitch markers.
I am decidedly low brow when it comes to my knitting. I usually use those plastic safety pin clippy stitch markers from Clover. One time, I got a few of those lightbulb stitch markers from the dry cleaner and you would’ve thought it was Christmas morning over here:
Knitting the lace repeat for this scarf requires five or six stitch markers to keep it all straight. Do I have that many? Of course not! So, not to be deterred, I borrowed several tiny elastic hair ties from my daughters. Is it pretty? No. Does it work? So far! I would show my scarf progress, but given that it’s lace, it is just going to look like a tangle until I block it.
I would love to get some charming stitch markers so that I don’t look so down home over here. Do you have any that you love?
A Yarn Tail 
Lace yarn is a bastard. Are you using metal needles? wood or bamboo is grippier. Also, has anybody mentioned a “lifeline”? on the last pattern row of a repeat, thread a darning needle with fine contrasting yarn and take it through all the stitches on your needle, and leave it there, with the ends dangling at each end of the row. If you do that at the end of every pattern repeat, leaving all the lifelines in place, if you go wrong, you only have to go back that far. It applies to any lace pattern, not just lace in lace weight yarn.
I have loads of stitch markers. I prefer the round ones without dangly bits as they irritate the hell out of me. I have metal ones and plastic ones. The clippy ones you have I use for marking the end of a row – say when I start armhole shaping – because they’re lockable and will come out. Those little hairbands look perfect! If it works . . . .
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I was using metal needles, even though I should know better. I think I just got a little overconfident. You know, I knit two sweaters for myself and figured I had this knitting thing down – haha! The new pattern seems to be more my speed.
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I’ve been knitting 60 years now and there are things I just can’t do. I do bobbles with a crochet hook. I don’t knit with laceweight having tried and failed! I can’t do anything too complicated and my favourite patterns are ones that look fancy but are easy to do . . .
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I make beaded stitch markers to use. So pretty and useful!
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Do you have a shop? I would love to see them!
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