Knitting lace

Had a great time last night at the Shoreditch Sisters. Due to a mix up between my idea of what we'd need to bring to make rugs, compared to our inspiring speaker Annie Sherburne's tools and more professional technique, I ended up doing half the teaching and spent most of the night doing a good impression of knowing what I was talking about. I'll be sticking up a guide to the technique I was teaching, when I have finished a big demonstration rug, but for now here is one of my recent makes:

Here is an arm warmer from a Rowan learn to kit lace kit. I don't think the designer at Rowan had thought about the contradictory nature of a garment for warmth being covered in holes, but then I'm not exactly sure under what circumstances I'll be needing an arm warmer either. On learning lace, my first attempt came out a bit wrong, and it wasn't till I bought Purls of Wisdom: The Book of Knittingfrom Fabrications after seeing it on their blog, that I really understood how to do it.

For the uninitiated, knitting patterns are full of instructions like "K2, K2tog, YO, K2tog" etc. The Rowan pattern calls for a YWFD, which means "yarn forward", which it describes as

Bring yarn forward between the needles and over the right needle to form a stitch.

"Purls of Wisdom" describes a YO instead, which is Yarn Over, as

Bring the yarn to the front of your work, just as you would if you were about to make a purl stitch. With your yarn in front, knit the next stitch.

which might still be gibberish to you, but made more sense to me and seemed to make neater, bigger holes in the lace.

My next knitting milestones to conquer, after cables and lace, are some fancy stitch patterns and following bigger charts, and intarsia.