Here is pattern one complete of my knit lace sampler. It’s a simple diagonal eyelet pattern, with garter stitch below and above and along the sides. You can see that I didn’t quite have the pattern down for my first few rows and the eyelets aren’t as sharply diagonal as I would like. But, I’m approaching this in the legitimate spirit of a sampler, something to demonstrate my skill but also to develop my skill. If I get a pattern entirely wrong, I’ll re-work it, but I’m going to let the hiccups in my learning process be apparently along the way.
This was a nice pattern to start with because once you get into it the repeat is nice and easy. It’s basically k4 (yo, ssk)x2 across each row, with a staggering at the front of rows to shift where the two eyelets fall (due to the yarn overs) each round.
The red thread along the top of the piece is my plan for when I do really mess up a pattern. At the end of each successful pattern, I’m knitting two rows of garter stitch and then running a length of #10 cotton through the stitches. This way, if I have to rework the next pattern (or, I shudder to think, 40 patterns into the piece I have a needle fall out), worse case I unravel back to that thread, pick up those stitches, and start over. My plan is to maintain two threads, so place another one after pattern two in the same way. Then, each pattern after that, I pull out the bottom thread, run it through the stitches above the pattern I just finished, and carry on.