Knitting from someone else’s pattern is always an
education.  Currently, I am being
schooled by Vicki Square’s
“Lace Back Top” (VogueKnitting
Spring/Summer 2012).  This is a birthday
request present for Sarah. It is just the kind of thing she will wear a lot –
especially in the North Carolina
heat!  Well worth knitting.

(It is rated Intermediate though I think it fits the
Experienced category as it does involve “complicated shaping and finishing”,
but I digress….)

The back is lace (with yarn-overs and such on both right
& wrong sides) – and extends to the front at the lower left, sort of like a
wing.  Basically, you cast on the back
and left front extension wing-thing and start knitting the lace decreasing one stitch at the left edge every
other row, then every row.  The
designer tells you to K2tog (leaving a selvedge stitch on the edge) for the
every one of these decreases. 

Which, in hindsight, is the way to go.

But I got hung up on maintaining the lace pattern – so if an
SSK would fit into the pattern better or a P2tog, I did that.  Then, as the left edge of the pattern was
eaten away (kinda tricky marking the chart as I went along, so I would know
where I actually was in the lace patterning…), there would be Inc & Dec
pairs that lost their Dec (the stitches that I would have used for it were gone,
so to speak) while the YO Inc (which was several stitches to the right and
still a viable part of the pattern) remained. 
So, I ended up using some random K3togs and P3togs to even things
out.  Sometimes I had to decrease with
stitches I didn’t even have – a trick of unfortunately placed YOs….

Does any of this make sense?!  “well, sort of…”  Yeah, that’s how it is for me too.

On the plus side, the knitting (lace, diminishing edge &
all) looks like it is supposed to look. 
And I think the numbers are right. 
At some point I am directed to stop nibbling away at the left edge and
just ruthlessly bind off some 21 stitches….so any little adjustment can
probably be made in that carnage,
right?

Maybe if I had stuck to the simple K2togs (even on the wrong
side!), it would have looked fine – and been a bit les brain-wrenching
(although those paired Inc & Dec pairs would have been an issue
nonetheless…), but probably this has been a good workshop on lace
decreasing.  An education, to be sure.