Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

When I bumped into Cecelia Campochiaro at STITCHES Salt Lake, I mentioned how much I loved her 2015 book Sequence Knitting . I asked if she was working on another book that would explore lace sequence knitting with yarn overs and other maneuvers. She enthusiastically replied she was working on a book about marls and was having a great time with it. At that moment, I was a little disappointed. Marls? That's just holding two colors together to make a third color. I've done that in counted cross-stitch for years. How could anyone write a whole book about that? And it's such a simple concept. What could you find to say that would fill up a book? For most of us, the subject of marling could hardly be longer than a magazine article. But, of course, in Cecelia's hands, the subject has unanticipated depth, complexity, and design possibility. Making Marls is a large affair of the coffee-table book variety. There are plenty of photographs and charts. Most are large and easy-to-r...

Galina Khmeleva's Russian lace class was not the only lace class I took at Georgia FiberFest in 2017. I also took a class called "Introduction to the History, Methods, and Styles of Lace Knitting" from Franklin Habit. Franklin talked about the various traditions including Shetland, Orenburg, and Estonian. In the class handouts he included charts of a motif typical for each tradition. I keep notebooks of the handouts from the many classes I've taken. It is often useful to have swatches with those handouts. So, I decided to knit up samples from Franklin's class. The process got me thinking about lace in general. First off, there is sometimes a distinction between lace knitting and knit lace: knitted lace = action on both right side and wrong side lace knitting = action on right side; mindless wrong side Also, some laces are stockinette-based (knit on right side, purl on wrong side) and some are garter-based (knit on both sides). Garter tends to be bumpier, ...