Lace grafting

I was right to be concerned about grafting the two sides of the clementine shawlette. A little research on Ravelry showed that the airy instruction to just graft the pieces together gives an ugly seam with a break in the pattern. It was also apparent there was no way to avoid a seam. However, Ruthless Knitting and Beautiful Things had documented how to use Lucy Neatby's grafting approach to enable you to graft somewhat in pattern, and therefore at least blur the seam a little.

I decided to work one more right side (patterned) row after the last purl ridge, then use the first colour of waste yarn to do a wrong side, mostly purl, row. I then knitted about 6 rows in the second waste yarn and threaded the yarn tail through the live stitches.



I then was able to graft together the two sides using the guide purl row in colour 1 on each side. The only trick was starting off and making sure everything was in line. I then carefully followed the path of the waste yarn on each side as it touched the main yarn, and ignored where it looped around the second waste yarn. As this was a fairly plain purl row, with no yarnovers or decreases to contend with, it was quite a clear, if slow, operation. Personally, I'd much rather do 3 simple operations in making up than one difficult one that requires judgement and discretion in matching pieces. The final seam is visible but not offensive.




Here it is blocking: