Discovery

Learning to knit involves a lot of discovery. As a case in point, my latest foray into Lace. Ah...that scary word. I fought this one for a long time. I would knit and knit, but the result looked like mud instead of lace.  I thought there was something wrong with me. All the pretty pattern had eluded me. And then I discovered, while watching Liat Gat, that I was wrapping my yarn overs the wrong way. Who knew it would make a difference! This discovery caused me to look at the way I was doing other stitches, but the most remarkable thing is that, with that one change, my lace now looks like lace! Hallelujah!!

Having discovered the solution to my problem....I got cocky. I thought I could just knit away and I would have lace. Wrong! I would get to the end of a row and have too many stitches or too few to complete the row. So I figured intense concentration was necessary. This made my head hurt and took the fun out of knitting lace, but I persevered. I could not let this beat me. I tinked and I knitted, I tinked and I knitted until I almost wore the yarn out. But I discovered something. Looking at the chart (and yes I would advise a chart over written instructions for lace all day long)  I discovered that the sea of symbols ran together and I couldn't keep my place. So, I might skip from one O or / to another and the pattern was contaminated because I had gotten the stitches out of order.

So how do I overcome this? I decided my brain didn't work well with the chart. I do not mean that there is something wrong with my brain. Recent brain studies have shown that we don't all learn the same way. I decided that not all brains deal with the "symbol sea" the same way and mine was one of them. In order to follow the pattern without losing my place I resorted to a number of solutions. One of them was to sing a song so that each word was a square on the chart. By keeping up with the song, I would know where my place was in the chart. I would not suggest this method as it did not work that well and people look at you funny.

I tried a number of things. I won't describe them all. The one that finally worked was to color 3-block columns of the pattern with alternating colors.

This way I could remember pink or green or blue and relative position (section 1, 2, or 3) and that helped tremendously.

I still get hung up sometimes, but at least I don't want to ball it up, needles and all, and throw it in the corner.

Next Newbie advice: Find out how your brain works and do what you need to facilitate knitting lace...or anything else for that matter.