Untangling lace on the bias

I love knitting lace shawls that creates a biased fabric and always wondered how the lace patterns were made.

After a lot of googling, hoping there was some kind of easy trick, I have come to the conclusion that the easy trick is…just messing around with the pattern until you add enough increases/decreases to either end that you’re ready to work a new repeat when it’s time to do so.

I won’t pretend to be an expert on this, so I don’t have any super quick tips. What I will do is describe the process I used, in case that helps you apply the same process to other lace motifs.

I’m working with a 7-stitch repeat, which I arbitrarily am adding 4 edge stitches to (2 before, 2 after). The repeat is only 4 rows long, so I’m going to work it twice, giving me 8 rows in which to add 7 stitches on the front end (adding 1 repeat), and remove 7 stitches from the back end (removing 1 repeat).

Special knitting graph paper exists, but any will do for this task since we don’t need to have accurate stitch dimensions. I’ve got most of a pad that I think I’ve had since…high school maybe??

I start with the front end first - maintaining the exact same stitch count over the repeat isn’t a huge deal so long as I start and end with the same count, so I’m not worrying out making the increases/decreases match exactly and leaving the back end for later.

Write out the base repeat a few times and decide how many repeats/rows you’ll need to add another repeat. To check my math I’m including purl rows.

In this case, I’m using 8 rows, so 3 RS rows will need to have 2 stitches added, with the 4th adding 1. When possible, I want to start working elements of the repeat into the new stitches, so the increasing section is less obvious. In other words, I don’t want the new section to be pure stockinette until it’s ready to accommodate a full repeat. (This is just personal preference!) Plus, you can use the yarnovers from the lace as increases.

As you can see from the many marks, a lot of this was trial and error. I wrote out several iterations before trying a swatch and made further corrections once I was able to see where stitches were lining up in relation to the increases.

Then, it was time to do the back end. Same deal as before, except this time starting with two full repeats + edge stitches, and gradually removing stitches from the last repeat. From this, I learned I would need to have 3 edge stitches at the end to accommodate decreases. Then, after I had a decent setup for the decreases and had tested it out on my swatch, I realized I had the same problem as before - not enough yarnovers on the decreasing side! So I reworked it yet another time, this time adding in more of the original lace elements and moving decreases as needed.

I’m happy with the results, although knitting the swatch was crucial to double-checking my assumption about stitch counts and placement. Maybe a lace genius would have been able to accurately guess these without swatching, but unfortunately I’m just not at that level! The good news is regular old elbow grease did the trick, and now I feel way more confident in trying this in future patterns!

Do swatches lie, or are they just telling an incomplete truth?

Swatches are supposed to help knitters identify their gauge with various yarn and needle combos and use that to create a finished object in the size they’re expecting. But, too often knitters complain that their swatch lied, as their WIP is working up to be too large or small. What’s the point of making a swatch if it will only let you down?

Much swatching advice has to do with the time of day, mental state, and knitting conditions. For example, if you typically do your knitting after dinner, beverage of choice in hand, while watching Netflix, so should you knit your swatch. And there’s the magical technique that allows you to swatch in the round without knitting an actual tube, which lets you avoid gauge differences in your knit vs purl rows when knitting flat.

But there are so many other factors besides these! Some of them require a certain amount of experience and experimenting with a variety of different types of projects, so the more types of projects you try out, the more data you can collect about how you personally knit. From here on out, I’ll be sharing some personal examples I’ve discovered while knitting a variety of different objects, which will hopefully help you identify your own gauge quirks even if the examples don’t exactly match your situation.

A big factor I’ve noticed causes major changes in gauge is the width of the project round or row. For example, for me, a stockinette hat knit on 16” circulars with US 7s will come out with a tighter gauge than a 300-stitch stockinette sweater body on a 32” circ with US 7s. Something about those hundreds of stitches just makes me relax! Taking that same sweater, when I move to the sleeves I have one of two things occur: I use magic loop, in which case my gauge is way tighter than the body, or I use a 12” circ and my gauge is only a little tighter than the body. If I knit the sweater in pieces (front and back), then seamed it, the lower stitch count (and needing to knit and purl to maintain stockinette) would result in a tighter gauge, so I might not need to size down a needle. What this has taught me is that in order to keep a consistent gauge across a project’s different elements, I need to use either smaller or larger needles depending on what part of the sweater I’m knitting. This is usually the case with ribbing vs not-ribbing, but for me it applies to parts beyond that.

And that’s just talking stockinette! Now let’s consider the different types of stitch patterns - ribbing, cables, lace and the like. Alternating knits and purls make me tighten up, so I rarely need to go down a needle size for the ribbing on a sweater or hat. The same goes for cables - being slowed down by the stitch pattern keeps my gauge from loosening up too much, so it’s less likely that I need to size down a needle.

Are you knitting two matching objects, one after the other, like socks or sleeves? If you’re like me, your gauge may loosen up on the second one as you get familiar with the pattern. If possible, you can mitigate this by knitting two-at-a-time, and if not, keep this in mind as you knit the second object, checking your gauge to make sure it isn’t too different, or consider using a different needle size.

Next, consider the type of needles you’re using. If you have a variety of types (circs vs straight needles, wood vs metal, or even 2 different brands of the same type of needle), differences in those might get you different gauge results. For example, I get a much tighter gauge on metal needles than the same size needle in wood or bamboo. If my swatch on a wooden needle just about got me gauge, I might knit the object with metal needles of the same size instead to help tighten up that last little bit. Or, I have bamboo needles with very long tapers, meaning I have to push the stitch far back onto the right needle for it to be the right size. Since I knit very close to the tips of my needles, using the bamboo tips can result in smaller stitches and change my stitch or row gauge. Knitting with massive needles and bulky yarn, I always get a snug gauge because I have to slow down or risk letting stitches slip off the needles!

Finally, let’s talk a little bit about the yarn you’ve chosen for the pattern. If you’re like me, you rarely use the exact yarn the designer used in the original pattern. But going with a different type or blend of fiber can affect your gauge too! The experience that really drove this home for me was knitting socks. My standard recipe is always: a 64 stitch sock on my trusty metal 0s...until that doesn’t work. I had been using extremely soft and squishy merino for most of my socks, so I could get a nice bulletproof fabric with this stitch/needle combo. Enter Knit Picks Hawthorne, which is a DENSE sock yarn that doesn’t squish down easily. Knitting it on 0s was awful, and once I sized up to a more appropriate needle, 64 stitches would no longer work or I’d end up with socks too large for me.

At this point, you may be ready to give up - with so many factors to take into account how could anyone possibly be able to knit anything that fits? Start with what you have - what projects have you completed that ended up with a different gauge or fit than you were expecting? Go and re-measure your gauge on those, and on projects that turned out perfectly. See if you got a different gauge on the sweater body, collar, or sleeve, and compare that to the stated gauge of the pattern (or the gauge you were aiming for, if different). Compare paired objects like socks and sleeves to each other - are they different gauges? Take stock of your available needles - if you have multiple options available, what are your preferred needles/cables for what types of projects? What kind of gauge can you expect with that combo?