Several months ago (okay, close to a year ago), I availed myself to Gudrun, of The Loomy Bin, to help me out of a mess I made with my card weaving. After she helped me sort out why the pattern wasn’t working for me (I was overthinking it), we sat down and looked at some of her latest knitting projects. She was trying to translate some weaving patterns into knitted fabric as an exercise. One of the areas that she wanted me to look at was lace. She wasn’t satisfied with the way lace always leaned toward one side or the other. There wasn’t a way of centering an eyelet.
I gave her a short lesson on the anatomy of a lace, and how it really isn’t possible to make a perfectly centered eyelet. The only way I knew how to do it was to do a left leaning decrease, yarn over, and right leaning decrease. But this decreases 2 stitches to the one increased stitch created by the yarn over. To counteract the lost stitch, I told her to hide an increase either somewhere in the same row (lace knitting) or somewhere in the next row (knitted lace).
Neither options were terribly elegant.
But now, there is an elegant solution! Thanks to Janine, I stumbled upon the answer at Schoolhouse Press. Scroll to the bottom of the bottom of the article for “Pithy Instructions for Centered Eyelets.” Pure genius! So simple! So elegant!
Okay, I’m off to re-write some of my lace patterns to center my eyelets.