Lace-Making Tips

Peg Abendroth PegAbend@AOL.COM asked for hints for making lace. She complied the following: Here are some of the hints I got from knitters with lace experience. Applying some of the suggestions resulted in a well-knit lace top. Nary a dropped stitch (I hate to be mending a garment before I have even worn it). Knit well, there should be no holes. Fussy, aren't I? We should be. I knit to have better clothes than I can afford to buy. Thanks to everyone who sent ideas.

1. Tune your machine. Clean and oil it. Check the sponge bar. Check the needles, latches and gate pegs.

2. More weights!!! Some used the ribber cast-on comb, some used bars or knitting needles threaded across the work to have the weight distributed more evenly. Though I was knitting on a relatively fine yarn, the weight did not hurt it. If need be, start with about 20 rows of waste yarn to hook the heavier weight bar into. One person used 10 main bed weights. I used 2 of the small ribber weights. Another used several of the heavy ribber weights on the triangle weight holders. Experiment. Too much weight will cause the lace carriage to drag; too little will cause stitches to pop off.

3. Move your weights up more frequently.

4. Watch every row that has stitch transfers to be sure all the stitches are on the right needles. If you have 3 stitches on a needle, you may wish to pull those needles out to the upper working position.

5. Have very good light and place a contrasting colored fabric behind your knitting to be better able to see the lace formation.

6. After running your lace carriage, check for dropped stitches before you run the knit carriage (Brother/Knitking).

7. As you drop stitches, mark your bed with a grease pencil at that location. If it continues to drop, the needle may need attention.

8. Tension must be just right. Experiment on the swatch to achieve easy passage of the carriages.

9. Keep little gold safety pins handy for catching dropped stitches that can be fixed later.

Special thanks to Peg for compiling this list and to Margaret Williams, Dawn Liles, Char in Iowa, Alicia Garcia, Jan Burch, Julie Tamura, and Peg Carpenter for sending her these lace tips..

Joan Alsop yateholm@glinx.com also suggested hanging the knitting over the top of the ribber, not down in between the beds. This works very well for help in not dropping stitches.

Mollie Jones jones@wantree.com.au added that one of the main culprits as far as dropping stitches when knitting lace is the needle indicator strip. Have a good look at it and run your finger over the front edge. If it feels like it has little bumps or it looks scalloped, then it definitely needs replacing.

Sandy Lightfoot of Sandy's Pattern Pantry spp@cancom.net shared several tips about lace because, as she said, "...lace is one of my favorite knitting techniques,"

1. When knitting lace she inserts the Fine Ribber Bar. This brings the needles forward a bit and helps eleviate dropped stitches. This is especially great when knitting the Fashion Laces. She added that she hasn't tried this on the Studio, but it certainly works great on the Brother lace system. (The fine ribber bar is that long plastic strip that is normally used when knitting full needle rib.)

2. She always leaves the ribber attached and allows knitting to hang down between both beds.

3. The combination of weights and tension is critical. She uses a Brother cast on comb with 2-3 claw weights or the special weighted combs that come with the Studio lace carriage or the triangular (Studio) combs with a small ribber weight hung in each hole.

4. Unless the pattern states otherwise, she usually begins with K10-15 rows WY and 1 row of Ravel Cord. As lace knitting progresses, she repositions the comb and weights as soon as the weights hit her knees. Also she hangs a claw weight at each end and repositions every 30 rows or so. If the garment piece begins with ribbing, she hangs the comb and weights into the ribbing.

5. The most important thing is to watch carefully after each transfer row. Check all the stitches and make sure they have actually been transferred properly. Double check before doing the knitting rows because mistakes are easier to correct if discovered right away. After 2-3" have been knit, any transfer problems will disappear (usually). She thinks the machine recognizes an "up tight" operator and it reacts according. (Here Sandy stated she was only kidding about the machine, but, honestly, sometimes I wonder...)

Mary Ide ideym@GOLD.OCN.NE.JP send some ideas about shaping with lace. She says casting off and decreasing stitches are no problem. Just be sure to do them when you're suing the mai8n carriage and don't leave any needles in Hold position when you're ready to go back to moving the Lace carriage. If the needles need to be in hold, knit the stitches off on a separate piece of yarn and put the needle all the way back to A position. It will make a very big stitch which sometimes wants to fall off the needle hook if it's not exactly the same tension as the surrounding ones, but you won't loose the stitch since the loop is so large. Of you can temporarily cast them off the the cast on thread or any other waste yarn, and then put them back on again later. But when you finish holding, you want to knit one last row over all stitches in order to fix the gaps that appear between groups. For most other types of knitting, you wrap the end stitch each time you put a new group in hold and then just knit off all stitches for the last row. But for lace you can't really do the wrapping as you go. So you really need to pick up the loop that formed next to the base of the end stitch in each group (which would have been a wrap) where the yarn started back in the middle of a row. If you just knit the final row without doing anything first, you'll get little gaps. They not horribly noticeable especially since you have other holes in the lace, but they aren't really something you want, either. And the larger or thicker the yarn is, the more noticeable they will be.

A special thanks to all these great folks for sharing with us! If you find a tip useful, why not drop them an email? I'm sure they'd appreciate it!---Northtipton