Idiot Lace

This post is going to be about yarn overs. Yarn overs are the easiest part of learning to knit lace. You simply wrap the yarn over the needle.

I've been doing this in a counterclockwise direction and am aware that eventually some lady will tell me straight from her Midwestern hip that I've been doing them wrong all this time. It seems that sensible people would wrap yarn in a clockwise direction, but, since I find knitting to be mostly counter-intuitive, I'm sort of enjoying working out my anxieties in a physical way.

So, every time I wrap the yarn around the needle I wrap it in a counterclockwise direction. And I snicker about that. So many metaphors for Life could come out of this: "turning back time", "counterclockwise", "ass backwards" and "just the plain old wrong way to do it, stupid." And sometimes I wonder if Australian and Brazilian knitters wrap their yarn clockwise just because they live below the Equator. I've heard that toilets naturally flush in the opposite direction, why can't Yarnovers swirl in parallel with the movement of gravitational vortices as well? Hmm, I wonder if Norah Gaughan considers this in her designs?

So a yarn-over makes a hole that's not an accident. It adds a stitch for the next row. That's useful for removing stitches down the needle.

An intentional hole. Imagine that. Not a mistake. I told you that yarn-overs are easy. Problem is, the mistakes then seem to show up in the designs for which yarnovers are used.

Yarnovers make lace lacy along with gathered stitches elsewhere in the fabric. Some knitters can make beautiful patterns that are a combination of 40 weird stitches wide going in both directions and up and down in rows as well. When finished, these are called "Museum Pieces." Well, knitters, humble anonymous women that they generally are, simply call them "Heirloom Pieces" which they want to pass down to their children and to their children's children and on and on.

Point is, if you can pay attention to what hole you're on, you're able to concentrate really well and you'd probably test right off a psychology chart that rates IQ. Also, probably nothing else stressful is going on in your life because when something goes wrong in the knitting, trying to fix it is like trying to put together a Rubic's Cube. I wonder if statistically more professional Mathematicians own "Heirloom" pieces that have been passed down to them by their brilliant, humble and repressed Grandmothers who had no where else to go with their high IQs.

What I'm going to say about Yarnovers now is anti-social. I wonder if maybe Mathematicians are naturally handicapped in their lack of understanding about good design. Truth is, they make clothes that are impossible to wear. The holes show through to one's skin and underwear. Yarn overs in clothes offer the x-ray vision to see what's underneath those skirts that men always crave in the movies. Right now, I'm looking at an advertisement by a yarn/pattern company that's selling a lace top that's totally exquisite. Not only in a lace pattern full of yarnovers draped right over the model's perky 19 year old breast, but a string of beads is criss-crossing over the breast as well so your eye goes straight to the yarn-overs. And, I swear to God, the spot where her nipple would be is photoshopped in white. Those white holes are all I could pretty much see after I picked up the magazine from my mailbox today. I can't help it, I keep looking for something taboo and I keep realizing that this is probably an effective way to get a date. If a girl walks around in stilletos and high heels, she's asking for it. But this girl is more likely to get raped, in my opinion. The hooker in the heels probably has a can of mace or a knife to defend herself. Lace girl has no place to hide anything, a perfect victim.

Lace pattern? Talent and IQ of knitter? Hours of hard work and years of experience? Beautiful drape? It's all lost on me as I try to keep staring into the wearer's eyes while concentrating on figuring out why she would wear such a thing in public? What did she do with her nipple?

So there, that's my idea about yarn overs. They are holes, people should intentionally put them in places where people can concentrate on how lovely they are, like on a shawl or around an ankle.

Designers should also offer alternative stitches for those of us who need filler, or caulking, as it were. They could sell more patterns that way.