Little Diamonds

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 row you're on. Even if you're good at reading your knitting, when the back side looks just like the front side, it's distressingly easy to get lost. The result looks fairly nice, though. Nice enough to be worth doing double decreases by purling lots of stitches through the back loop? Hmm. There is another advantage, which is that if your yarn tends to bias in stockinette, the reversible pattern is balanced enough to stay neatly square.