Yesterday was getting the stripes on the Sunshine Throw Worsted Blanket set up, so that I wouldn’t have any wonky color changes.
Today, I look at why on earth the stripes of Mystical Marl Yarn are zigzagging. And what, if anything, can be done about it?
Zigzag stripes in lace featured the Mystical Marl Yarn. Why does this happen?
In looking at this variation of the Sunshine Throw, it’s clear that the stripes are zigzagging around. But why?
To answer that, we have to look at the anatomy of lace knitting.
Lace knitting uses yarn-over stitches to create holes in the fabric. These are the characteristic holes of lace. However, these create a stitch, so, unless you want to increase the number of stitches in your object, you’ll need a corresponding decrease to even the stitch count back out.
Now, in knitting, most decrease stitches lean in a specific direction. For example, the knit two together decrease leans to the right, while the slip, slip, knit, increase leans to the left.
We can see this very clearly in the lace repeat chart for the Sunshine Throw pattern. The symbols on the stitch chart show us the direction that the stitches lean.
The Sunshine Lace Chart from the Sunshine Throw pattern is where we begin to look at why lace stripes zigzag.
The k2tog stitch, shown on the chart by the ‘/’ symbol, slants to the right, just like the forward slash does, while the ssk (slip, slip, knit) stitch, shown on the chart by the ‘\’ symbol, slants to the left – just like the back slash does. This makes for great visual shorthand so you can actually see whether your knitting is doing what you want it to do and leaning the way you want it to.
However, this has other implications, and that’s where the zigzagging stripes come in.
Decreases are also used in bias knitting, which can create some really cool diagonal designs, like the Corner to Cozy blanket pattern. But what makes the stripes slant one way or the other is the same slant that I was talking about in the lace knitting. If you knit a pattern with k2tog stitches, the stripes slant to the left, the opposite of how they normally lean. If you were to do it with ssk stitches, the stripes would slant to the right.
It’s this that makes the stripes in the Sunshine Throw zig back and forth. Every time there’s a k2tog stitch, the fabric leans a little bit to the right, so the stripe slopes a bit to the left. Every time there’s an ssk stitch, the fabric leans a bit to the left, so the stripe slopes a bit to the right.
This is why striping in lace fabric can get a bit wonky, but in this case, it also worked in my favour, since the decreases are symmetrical so that the stripes would be symmetrical too! If, for some reason, the decreases in the pattern aren’t symmetrical, you might have to do some further swatching to see how the stripes would change if they change at all!
There’s only one more consideration when you add stripes to a pattern – which is: what do you do with all those ends? Join me tomorrow for the finishing process of the Sunshine Throw and how I handled the many ends for each stripe!
This is part 3 of 5 in this series
Go back to part 2: Making Stripes in a Single Colour Pattern with Mystical Marl Yarn
Go to part 4: How to Weave in Yarn Ends for Striped Knitting Projects
