Fine Lace Shawl Knitting - the grafting challenge

This is a technical piece as I researched the way I prefer to for join live stitches at the top of the board/ wedge with the garter edge of the centre of a square shawl. 

The shawl in question is the glorious Firth Shawl by Elizabeth Williamson(1) This is not about joining the 4 wedges to each other but just to join the 2 sides to 2 sides of the centre. 

Overall structure of the shawl to show which grafts are involved

 

For the experiments  I had  prepared 4 samples of the board/ wedge and one sample of the centre. 

At this stage I asked for advice from the Grafting group on Ravelry, lead by Joni Coniglio (2) If you have followed  my blog for some years you will know I have used her method of grafting for invisible lace grafting for some time. I thought had never attempted to graft live stitches to the garter edge of a lace central square before. 

Joni suggested that I could try to pick up the ‘valleys’ of the  garter edge onto a needle and this might help. So I did that and also added waste knitting to make the graft easier on both the pieces to be joined. See note (3) for more details of this waste knitting  or my blog of 29 Nov 2021

I tried this making a ‘knit not noticeable ’ stitch row on the edge of the board / wedge and a ‘purl ridge’ on the public side of the centre. 

This is the graft

But I was getting a holey line on the centre side as indicated

I had picked up the valleys so I did try to pick up the ridges just to see if the holey row went. Answer no. 

So next I picked up using a much smaller diameter needle. I know Shetland Lace knitters have a pick up needle whenever they are picking up lace. It is very narrow and I was fortunate to be gifted one. But even using this for the pick up from the side of the garter stitch did not diminish these extra holes enough.

I had run out of edges on my trial shawl centre! So I thought I could just knit a garter stitch strip and use that as all I was doing  was joining a garter stitch edge to live stitches. I thought about this for some time and realised that I had actually had the same problem when I had knitted the first Unst Shawl that I had Knitted with my own fine handspun yarn. 

Construction plan for this Unst shawl 

I got the Unst Shawl out now I am more experienced I wondered how I had  done this years back. It seemed good and did not have this extra town of holes/ loose stitches.

It seemed I had utilised the knotty edge on the Unst Shawl, so would try that. 

I did not want to stretch these so I put the very fine needle through the knotty edge stitches and then ran a slightly thicker yarn through them so I had already worked out where to put the needle through during the grafting.

 

I worked the grafting just as I would in any lace knitting graft.

I would put the the wedge with proper waste knitting  to finish it off as the lower sample and the garter edge ( which would be the centre of the shawl ) just with one contrasting thread through or the knotty stitches) and along this edge I would the purl ridge showing uppermost. (As in fig 34 of Joni’s booklet ‘ How to graft your knitting invisibly , Interweave Knits) 

I was really pleased with the effect and did not think I could do any better. 

Now to knit the centre of the shawl and then to do these 2 grafts on the real thing. It will be 2026 before this is completed but I am aiming for Jul when the grandson who hasn’t yet got his shawl will be 13!! 

Thanks Joni for the spark that got me in the right direction and I hope this level of detail will help others. 

1. Firth Shawl by Elizabeth Williamson knitting see here
2. Grafting group by Joni Coniglio is on Ravelry 
3. How to Graft 2 sided lace knitting , top to bottom by Joni Coniglio Winter 2022 see Interweave

Apologies the links are playing up!