I have been having a heck of a time with the Milanese Lace in my Butterfly Q’mitl.  Ridiculously so – really, I knit lace from charts all the time and I should not be messing it up this much!  Mostly, I find myself reading the chart backwards.  Seriously? Yeah.

And it happens over and over – on both the right and wrong sides.  Can’t tell you why.  Maybe I get tired or distracted…but still, reading charts right-to-left on the right side and left-to-right on the wrong side is second nature to me.  I wouldn’t think I could jump directions mid-row if I tried!

The lace patterning is done on both sides – and it is easier to use the raised decrease column as a marking point for each repeat on the right side (you can kind of peak over the needles to look at it when you are working the wrong side).  The stitches are simple knits, purls, YOs, k2togs & p2togs – but they shuffle positions on each row.  And while I could place markers after each 6-stitch repeat, since there are 27 repeats that would be a lot of markers!  And there is a horizontal shift on one row – which would mean moving all the markers and then moving them back or something like that.  So, no markers.  I don’t think it would have solved my problem anyhow.

When all else fails, re-write the chart. So, I did.  Instead of showing a single repeat of the pattern with each of the 10 rows stacked on top of each other:

I wrote out each repeat twice per row, staggering the beginning (with the 2^nd repeat still stacked in line with the row below):

I though tit might give me a sort of “running start” at each pattern and then move me to the beginning of the next repeat.  Maybe keep me from reading the same pattern backwards and forwards on the same row!  I have done a couple of rows this way – so far, so good.