lace knitting needs a technical editor

[firecat]

I'm trying to learn lace knitting and I started with Knitty.com's Branching Out and the little spiral-bound Vogue Knitting Quick Reference.

First challenge: How to do a Yarn Over. Several different web sites and the reference book show entirely different ways of doing it. I still don't know if I am doing it right, but I am getting an extra stitch on the needle and a hole underneath, so I guess what I'm doing might be good enough. (In writing this entry I looked at yet more web sites. The video accessible from
http://www.knittinghelp.com/knitting/basic_techniques/increase.php
is the most useful I've seen so far, and suggests I'm doing it the right way.)

Second challenge: I keep running out of stitches before the instructions run out. I count stitches, try again several times. Then I count stitches on the pattern. Finally I realize that although my reference book implies that YO means "yarn over and knit the next stitch," when the Knitty pattern says YO it means simply "wrap the yarn around the needle" and what you do next depends on what the next instruction is. Try again with this in mind. It works. Yay me for figuring it out! Boo Knitty and Vogue for being entirely unclear on this point!

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I'm another who's shocked that books imply that YO includes a knit stitch immediately after the yo. Because sometimes you need to purl, and sometimes the next stitch is K2T or SSK, or something even fancier. It would limit lace patterns far too much otherwise.

On the other hand, you always want some plain knit stitches (or purl) at the end of the row - don't try to end a row with a yo. Maybe that's what they were trying to convey, or misunderstood?

[firecat]

The Vogue book described multiple ways to YO (do it this way if you're knitting the next stitch, this other way if you're purling, etc.), but the way I read it, I thought that when you saw simply "YO" in the instructions it meant to knit the next stitch.

This might have been a mis-reading on my part. But as a technical editor I consider mis-readings by intelligent beginners as opportunities for clarification.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I agree with you - these books often need better proofreading.

I think part of the problem may be that a lot of people can't learn stuff like this from books (my mother was repeatedly astounded at each new handcraft technique I taught myself from books), and so think they're only reference for people who already know what they're doing or have some in-the-flesh demonstrator handy.