Reading Your Knitting: Right- and Left-Leaning Lace Diagonals

Learning new skills and techniques is always loads of fun — there’s nothing like mastering something new and realising a whole new world of knitting possibilities has just opened up to you. Harder to teach, but perhaps even more revolutionary, is to learn how to read your knitting and really understand what’s happening.

In this pair of Little Lessons videos, I cover how to read your knitting, to keep a line of yarn overs and decreases lined up, without needing to refer to the chart or written instructions. This first video shows you how to line up your left-leaning decreases and yarn overs in a lace pattern that is worked on the right and wrong side. I’ve put it together with Jeanette Sloan’s Tumbling Block Lace Scarf from MDK Field Guide No. 15: Open in mind, but it should help you become more comfortable with reading your knitting for any lace pattern that features strong diagonal lines!

Here is the chart on which the first video’s swatch is based:

In the video, I refer to a simple chart, but really, it doesn’t matter where you position your first yarnover and decrease (ssk on the right side, ssp on the wrong) — the whole point of this swatching exercise is to read your knitting as it appears on the needles. Once you’re comfortable with you left-leaning diagonals, try your hand at the right-leaning ones:

I hope you’ve found these short lessons helpful and are feeling ready to look at your knitting with new understanding! If you’d like more lace tips, you could check out our Something New to Learn About Lace book which features some really fun patterns, but is also a great reference book for knitters new to lace. You can also find Field Guide No. 15 Open, which features the Tumbling Block Lace Scarf by Jeanette Sloan, which is shown in these videos, over in our webshop. And if you’d like more tutorials to help you build your confidence in reading your knitting, you might check out our videos on keeping track of your rounds and reading cables from charts over on our ever-growing YouTube channel.