Knitting -- around the worsted corner

I'm late with this because it took me so many attempts to get something right. Well, almost.

Many years ago I showed you short rows for taking a border or edging around the corner of a piece of lace. And I warned you that there would be a pucker at the corner. It's  almost unnoticeable in fingering or lace weight yarn, but you'll see it in worsted.

There are two ways to get around that. One is to work the basic motif of say the edging for as long as the edge of what you're already done, joining it on step by step, and then at the corner, cast on and work one more motif. Now work down that motif to the edge of what you are joining to, and continue on around. This is great for squares and it even works on triangles. Here's a "hap" (work) shawl in Unst Print of the Wave with a Catspaw border that does just that. The orange diamond is around that extra motif.

However, the edging (another Unst motif) doesn't work that way; at the point of the triangle, there's a swallowtail. What I did was work the edging to the end of the side, then cast on and start the new side separately.

With a rectangular border, you can mitre the border sides. This is best worked from a pattern which will tell you what to do where. There's one in my ancient Bantam Encyclopedia. But I wasn't satisfied with that, and that's what took me so long to work out; how to do it with a generic border or edging. In fact what I worked out probably would work with Joanne's edging, which you saw in a video on one of my posts. I won't send you back there; the camera work gave me nausea. Ask me if you want my version of her edging.

I did this with the same border I used above, catspaw. I did K1, P1 (a seed stitch boundary) for 11 stitches for two rows, worked K1, P1, the 7 stitches of the motif, P1, K1 for all 6 rows of the motif, so, one catspaw. The last row is knit since we're doing garter stitch.

Use a thumb cast on to add 3 stitches, turn, knit back, attach bottom free stitch of motif to first stitch. * Turn, kx, YO, k1, YO, kx. Turn, knit back, join, and repeat from *. The value of x is whichever row you are on for adding a YO, whether the first time or the 9th time as in my case. You will eat up one stitch from the first motif each row when you knit back to it. 

These instructions will get you better results than in the picture. I was joining on the right side of the fabric at the first motif, which is on the right side of the photo; you can see the ridge. Joining on the wrong side will put that ridge on the wrong side of the border.

Because I had that seed stitch border, I had to do one special thing. When I had two stitches left on the first motif, and I had put in the last YOs, instead of knitting back, I turned, and did P1/K1 back. Then I ate up the next to last stitch of the first motif. 

Then I turned, K2, PSSO to join the last stitch, P1, PSSO, K1, PSSO, P1, PSSO and so on until I got to the free end where the next motif would go

You won't have to mess with the K1/P1 stuff if you don't have that seed stitch border. You'll just join to the next to last stitch of your first motif, turn, join in the last stitch, and K/PSSO to the free end.

Pick up the stitches (11 in my case) on the other side of the mitre and work your motif for the length of the border on that side. 

You can also make all the pieces of your lace separately and join them together. Here are two ways to do that.

Russian graft:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8dNYTMJYq0

Kitchener stitch. This is good to learn because it is useful for closing the toes of top-down socks and the underarms of raglan sweaters. Make sure you work it from the RIGHT SIDE of what you're making.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOFcIiDg_hI

The same master knitter has two videos for joining parts that starts with a provisional cast-on that stabilizes the start of the border. Notice the sling-shot cast-on she uses for the provisional. This is like the cast-on for toe-up socks but they are not identical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K79jDBulQ5k

This is her video about what to do when you get back to your provisional cast-on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwB51y5-S7w