Mermaid Shawl KAL #4: Third Lace Pattern

I knew I was going to have a hard time trying to explain this. I wish I had you all here so I could just show you but I hope the photos will help. All you have to do it click on them to enlarge (I hope — Blogger has been difficult lately).

All you have to remember for the final lace pattern — the Mermaid Tails — is YO, K2tog. That’s it — both on the front and the back. However, you have to be a little creative in getting it to fit. On your final row of the second lace pattern, on the stitches in between the stitches that form the curve, you begin working the Tale Lace.
The first row will be YO, K, YO. On the backside that will be K, YO, K2tog.
The second row will be YO, K, YO, K, YO. On the backside that will be K, YO, K2tog, YO, K2tog.

You continue this progression until you have completed the final lace pattern however there is some fudging involved because of that first plain K stitch to keep the pattern even. It really isn’t complicated — it’s just hard to explain. You can see in the first picture how the Taile lace takes shape between the second lace pattern.

When it came to the finishing “tails”, on the first shawl which was worked in suri alpaca a rather large, I made a “tail” between each of the curves of the second lace pattern. However on this shawl, I tried that and they were very, very small because the yarn is a good deal finer, so I decided to work the tail lace over two repeats of the pattern. I love the way it turned out! It is so pretty. All you do is is work back and forth in K2tog, YO, K2tog, front and back. As you can see this decreases the number of stitches you working with on each row until you have 2 left on your needle. Cut the thread. Loop it through and start again on the next set of stitches. The cut yarn will be worked in when we work the crocheted edging or you can just weave it in.

As you can see in the pictures, I worked the ribbing on the 2 sides and down the back just as I would extra sets of lace stitches. I just figured how many stitches more or less this added to each tail pattern and fudged them in. This involved knitting a couple of K stitches instead of K2tog on the first row to make the tails the same size. I hope this makes some kind of sense.

Please let me know how badly I’ve confused you. I do hope this makes sense. I’ve gotten emails from people saying they are having trouble posting to Blogger lately so if you can’t get a comment posted feel free to email.

Good luck and thanks for knitting!