No stitch box

[igenlode]

I've wasted most of the evening trying to work out where to insert no stitch boxes when drawing up a chart of knitted lace -- all the references on the Internet (even when I'd worked out that was how you were supposed to represent a written pattern with differing numbers of stitches per row) tell you how to interpret no stitch boxes when you encounter them, not the theory of how to put them in!

And yes, it does matter where they go, since the whole point of the exercise is to establish the 'columns' in the pattern so that you end up with the right number of stitches when casting off at the edges. (Otherwise, how do you know what to do when instructed to 'cast off 6 stitches', one or more of which would normally involve knitting two stitches together?)

The most helpful reference I found was from Interweave, which explains its chart as follows:

You can see on Row 2 that two stitches are decreased (with k2togs) without compensating yarnover increases. This effectively removes two stitches from the row, leaving you two fewer stitches to work individually on Row 2 and, subsequently, Row 3.

By placing a no-stitch box next to each decrease, the chart-maker is telling you, “This stitch will no longer exist and should not be worked on this row.” The k2tog is worked over two stitches but is represented by only one stitch box. Therefore, the second stitch box, removed by the decrease, because the black hole we call the “no-stitch box."

So the answer appears to be that a no stitch box should be inserted after a decrease which does not have a corresponding 'm1' (make one stitch; 'yarnover' in modern American terminology) in the same row -- and in the same column in subsequent rows, until the 'missing' stitches are eventually created. So where you have 'm1' at either end of the row but 'k2tog' four times in between, you insert a no stitch box after the two central 'knit two together' symbols. And in the subsequent wrong-side row, where you basically just knit the purl stitches and purl the knit stitches, you insert two more no stitch boxes in the corresponding columns of that row. Then the following row has an extra couple of increases in it, and things are allowed to add up again...

Having established that, 'all' I have to do is map the cast-off edge onto the pattern chart and work out which decreases need to be edited out for the sections where only part of the pattern is left. Investigating historical knitting designs: a high-powered intellectual occupation!

Comments

[watervole]

That makes sense. I could imagine doing the same thing for a knitting pattern.

[watervole]

Should read when writing a lace knitting pattern...