Lace help

How-to Questions
1

Hi there,

I am working on a lace shawl and can’t get past row 4! Here are the first few rows…

Cast on 5 sts

Row 1: (right side) k2, yo, k1, yo, k2 (7 sts)
Row 2: (wrong side) k2, p3, k2
Row 3: k2, pm, yo, k1, yo, pm, k1, pm, yo, k1, yo, k2 (11 sts)
Row 4: k2, p7, k2
Row 5: k2, sl 1st marker, yo, k to marker, yo, sl 2nd marker, k1, sl 3rd marker, yo, knit to marker, yo, sl 4th marker, k2 (15 sts)

Here are my probs:

  1. Why don’t they specify to slip the stitches in row 4? They do in row 5…
  2. In row 5, after the second marker I have to k2 before I slip the 3rd marker and then at the end instead of k2 I have 3 stitches left to knit.

I have no clue what I’m doing wrong… I undid those few rows about 4 or 5 times now and am not sure why I can’t get past those rows! And I haven’t even gotten to the hard parts yet!

Any help will be appreciated!

Thank you in advance.

Lisa

2

Are you not coming out with the right stitch count following row 5?? Assuming you’ve got rows 1-4 down pat and you have 11 stitches as you start row 5, let’s break it down:

K2 = 2 stitches
slip marker
yo = creates 1 stitch
knit to marker = the way I figure, this should be K3
yo = creates 1 stitch
slip marker
K1 = 1 stitch
slip marker
yo = creates 1 stitch
knit to marker = again, this should be K3
yo = creates 1 stitch
slip marker
K2 = 2 stitches

So that should be a total of 15sts, which is what the pattern says. I noticed in your row 3 instructions you have only 3 places where it says ‘pm’, and in row 5 there are 4 places where it says to slip marker. Either you mis-typed that, or the pattern omitted it for some reason. I added it in my reasoning above. Could that be throwing you off??

As for why it doesn’t ask you to slip the markers in the row 4 instructions, who knows? :shrug:

3

Hi Knitqueen,

Thanks for offering your help.

Yes, I did accidentally omit a pm in row 3 - its supposed to be next to the last k2.

I’ll go through it again and see what I come up with…

4

They probably mention the markers in that row because the markers are being used as reference points.

5

Ok, I think I see where I was going wrong. Its in the positioning of the markers and the yos… I think in one case I was messing up the yo before the pm and wound up making a stitch where there should be none.

Thanks for the breakdown KQ! Ingrid I thik you’re right about that… I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something!

Thanks again!

Lisa (I may be back!)