Getting My Swatch On

I've been working on my Arrowhead Lace project. The pink worsted-weight yarn in the middle was to figure out the lace pattern. Would you believe I had to resort to doing only one pattern repeat at a time to get it straight? I added another after the first five or six inches, then decided I had it figured out enough to move on.

Next, I decided to try out my plan for the pattern in the brown yarn, some Silky Wool eventually destined to be a Branching Out scarf. You may remember that two skeins of Silky Wool in that blue-green color will eventually become my Arrowhead Swap Scarf.

My idea is, since the pattern's very linear, to try and do a bias knit scarf with a lace pattern running on the bias along the scarf. I added a vertical eyelet row along the edge. When the row of lace travels to the end of the scarf, it sort of blends into the eyelet row. I like it.

I've learned some things:

#1: When the pattern says "repeat of X plus 1", this means "plus one per row" not "plus one per repeat". Can you believe this was confusing me? Because "plus one per repeat" is the exact same as "plus one per row", so it couldn't be that. Duh. This insight is sort of irrelevant to the project, as there will be only one repeat per row, but was vital to the pink swatch. And, you know, to actually learning to knit lace.

#2: I really need to use a row counter or tally marks or something. I don't seem to be smart enough to either remember I'm on row 2, or figure it out from reading my knitting correctly. There are some pretty glaring lace errors on the brown swatch. And Little Arrowhead's a four row repeat, and two of those rows are resting rows. So my brain's not as big as I thought it was. But fortunately, I have several row counters!

#3: For me, increasing and decreasing for the bias on the wrong side row (rows 1 and 3 of Little Arrowhead) was much, much easier than doing it on the right side row along with the lace. I never forgot a decrease.

I still need to figure out how wide I should make this to a) use all the yarn, b) not run out of yarn, while c) producing a nice wide scarf with a good rythm.

This is fun!