Shelda's Adventures with Lace

This is complicated stuff!

I've just spent several hours working on charting the "Springtime" lace, and I see why I got hung up before! This is a pretty intricate pattern. For each shawl in the book (Stahman's Shawls & Scarves), Myrna has included a "building block," which is the basic unit for all the other charts. The "Elizabeth" and "Josephine" have the largest building blocks in the book: 32 rows X 18 stitches and 36 rows X 20 stitches, respectively. As best I can tell as this point (I haven't completely gotten the building block isolated to my satisfaction, although I think I just figured something out as I was writing this!), it's probably 24 rows X 38 stitches.

Working my swatch before, I decided that I didn't want to knit from the Kinzel charts directly (I'm not crazy about her symbols), and I wanted to have the freedom to arrange things in the same way Myrna has, and so I'm re-charting everything. It makes more sense to me as I read it, but it's slow going. To chart this pattern and have it make visual sense requires quite a few "no stitch" blocks, so it's not a straightforward process. Here's a little clip of my first try (the gray blocks indicate "no stitch" and the pink blocks are to remind me about a symbol that looks very like another one, but is worked differently).

As a side benefit, however, I 'm learning a lot about charting lace, and about the structure of lace; things I've wanted to know for a long time. I'm using Mac OS X, Microsoft Excel, and developing my own lace charting font (using Macromedia's Fontographer to modify a knitting symbol font I got years ago from XRX, Inc.) It's slow going at times (I've been working on charting lace off and on for about two years now), but I think I'm getting there. And this will be useful knowledge for the future, not just for this shawl. As I mentioned a few days back, I also want to learn to use Adobe Illustrator so that I can more easily make schematics of my shawl ideas. I think I'm thinking along the same lines as Sivia, who posted a comment on my previous entry, but without a schematic, I can't be sure.

I keep thinking that it might be wise to go ahead and knit one of the shawls in Myrna's book before I strike out completely on my own (I was one of her "proof-knitters" but I didn't actually complete a shawl). I'm pretty sure it would be useful to understand a bit more about how these shawls are structured. And I want to be knitting, not just charting and "figuring!" We'll see what I decide. It feels a bit like a side path, but it might bring me back around to the main path with a much clearer idea of how to proceed, especially if I continue working on the charting (and on learning Illustrator as well) as I go along.

I did know this wasn't an easy project when I embarked on it! If it had been, I would have finished it two years ago when I first had the idea. And I am enjoying the process, and feel like I'll eventually end up with a lovely shawl (or two), so all is well! At least I'm engaged again, and making progress.

Posted by Shelda at June 21, 2003 05:34 PM