I seem to be doing an awful lot of things at the moment! One of them is catching up on this piece of knitting which has been on the needles, by my estimate, for over two years now. Two years I hear you gasp in horror! Hmmmm, yes, it is rather a long time isn't it? I know it's that long, because I was just near the start when my dear soul and I went up to his daughter's just before Christmas two years ago - where her delightful puppy, Bella, thought that perhaps she could help and the whole thing nearly ended in a dreadful tangle! In my defence, it is 11 pattern repeats, of 20 rows each, over 240 stitches, round and round and round and round. But, at last, I'm nearing the end. Do you do Ravlery? I do, and its tremendously useful, because you can see what other people have done with the thing you are knitting. This "thing" is a snood, or it will be when it is finished; my second piece of lace knitting. It has a rather lovely, but scarily complicated looking edging, intended to be knitted separately and then attached. If done this way, it means counting out 120 pattern repeats, hoping your tension in this bit allows your edging to stretch all the way round, then laboriously sewing it on. So I had a look at what others had done, and found advice to knit the edging in with the rest of the knitting. Now that sounded even more scary, so I did several test rows first to make sure I understood what the edging involved before even thinking about incorporating it into the rest of the knitting.
Here's how it happens. You have a little group of seven stitches on your needle (which become nine for a while). You also have the rest of your knitting, on its circular needles (that extra shiny one is one end of this bit) dangling below the bit you're working on, all wriggly ....
at the end of every other row, you knit the final stitch together with the next stitch on the main piece, so you're trying to handle three needles and two bits of knitting with only two hands to do it all.
It's all rather finicky to start with as the circular needle that holds the lace squirms about and wiggle waggles like a live thing, and the little needles that hold the edging threaten to slip out of their stitches at every turn. You also have to make sure, after the knit the two bits together bit, that you push the stitches on the circular needle right back so they don't slip off while you continue with the edging. I finally I got the hang of it and now I am almost half way there.
It's all coming together rather nicely, and the best bit about it is that you don't have to count the repeats; you know when it's done, because there are no more stitches on your squirmy circular needle and you're back to where you started again ... or at least, I hope that's where I'll be!
