Polite Anarchy

Here is a brief exercise in one way to make a simple lace pattern reversible. I'm starting with a stitch called Little Diamonds , from Knitting Fool . I'm using this lace pattern to begin with because it's small, may be familiar to people who have done some lace knitting, and has both right-leaning and left-leaning decreases, plus a double decrease. Enough basic elements to make lace, but without too many additional complications like double yarnovers, or knit-five-together, or anything like that. This lace makes an overall field of diamonds or dots. If you drew a diagram of it, it might look like the picture on the left, below. To make this reversible, you could make half of the diamond shapes with purl stitches instead of knit ones, represented by the grey diamonds in the picture on the right. And indeed, it is possible to knit it that way, although it's not much fun. Half the decreases are done purlwise, and it's surprisingly hard to keep track of which...

The question of reversible lace is one I've been thinking about since early in my knitting career. It was probably several years ago that I was looking at the kind of simple mesh where you knit two together and yarn over, all across a row, then purl back. It occurred to me that you could do the same thing, but alternate between knit decreases and purl decreases. It's a multiple of four stitches (plus whatever selvage you want), and takes two rows: row 1: *p2tog, YO, ssk, YO*, repeat from * row 2: *p2, k2*, repeat from * It biases strongly, and makes a pleasant scarf with angled ends. Although the front and back side are not knit the same, the finished object is identical on both sides. Here's a small swatch where I cast on 18 stitches, so I had four repeats, plus a selvage stitch at each end.

I'm not quite sure where to start with this, but a story needs a beginning of some sort. So: Once upon a time (which is to say January), my mom signed up for an introductory lace knitting class. My mom has been knitting for a long time, in a small way, but has mostly never bothered with anything very advanced. Scarves and hats, that sort of thing. She feels like she has trouble finishing any project that's big, or that takes a long time. She figured that taking a class would give her a way of making sure she finished a larger-scale project. The class meets one day a month for most of the year, and between each session the students are meant to knit a section of a sampler that can be worn as a shawl. So she started her class, and started knitting the first lace pattern. At some point, she said to me, "I wish the lace looked nice on both sides!" Because, in a sort of general way, knitted lace tends to have a right side and a wrong side. And if you're knitting some...