Over on Ravelry, the Beginner’s Lace knitting group has just started to work on Saskia (http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/saskia). I have my homespun yarn to use up, so, what the heck! I though I’d give it a try on the loom. There are just single and double decreases and YO’s to deal with. I think it’s a pretty managable pattern on a knitting loom.
lace swatch-half gauge
The question is which loom to use. So I grabbed some similar weight wool from stash and knit up a bit of the pattern on my half gauge Markman Farm loom. This block just a hair lacier than I wanted, but definitely doable.
lace swatch-small gauge
Then I did anothe swatch on a small gauge loom. Not a huge difference, but I think this is more what I want. My project yarn is slightly finer that the red stuff. Of course, i’ve never done a big lace project before, so I could be wrong, but that’s how you learn!
Here’s the project so far:
saskia lace-about 2 repeats in
I’m pretty much following the needle knit pattern, except for reversing the knits/purls on the wrongs side (easy enough, there’s no lace worked on those rows). I also added an extra knit row between my CO and row 1 of the pattern. This is partially because I’ve been noticing that my BO edge seems thicker than my CO edge (This is noticeable in the neckline of the Ruana I’m currnetly working on–more on that another day). It’s also because I always cast on right to left unless I consciously make myself CO left to right. Apparently, I wasn’t very conscious when I when I cast on this project. I was about to start row 1 when I realized that I was on the left. So I could start over (after all my swatching, that option wasn’t feeling very attractive), I could convert all the decreases from left to right leaning and visa versa (that was bound to lead to confusion) or I could make a design “improvement.”
Easy choice!
I’ve also decided to just do ssk instead of trying to figure out s/1 k1 psso. It seems to me that they work out about the same anyway.
Any loomers out there want to join along?
