Kind of need a knitting icon

[jamethiel]

I have a question. I'm getting seriously into lace knitting: I'm currently knitting the haruha scarf (v easy) and I'm thinking about trying a slightly more challenging lacy shawl.

I was clicking around on links today when I found this, which is a fabulous review of cast on techniques for lace. While I have observed for myself that your standard cast off/on is sometimes too tight for the airy-ness of lace and can lead to some... strange shapes in the finished piece, my question is this.

Invisible cast-ons leave live stitches once the temporary false cast-on edge has been unravelled. What do you then do with the live stitches?? Do they get individually sewn back into the pattern? Or do you need to have some kind of edge for every knitted lace piece you make? I'm a little confused.

Comments

[malka]

Generally you use them to knit in the other direction. For instance, I've seen descriptions of square shawls where you invisibly cast on for the border in the lower left, knit a long skinny strip of border for the bottom, then put the invisibly-cast-on stitches on the needle with the other stitches and work back and forth across the entire width of the shawl.

The one exception is that if you work K1 P1 on the row after the invisible cast on, I think it won't unravel. I'm not sure it's a nice edge, though.

[jamethiel]

That's a handy tip about K1 P1, but I'm not entirely sure I'd care to put it to the test on anything major--I have wool-sucking cats, I'm afraid :S

[aquaeri]

I think it's right that K1 P1 in provisional won't unravel. I don't know, because I actually cast on directly into K1 P1 for my rib (Montse Stanley calls it "tubular cast on" in The Knitter's Handbook and describes it immediately after provisional cast on). I like the edge a lot on rib, because it just flows into the rib and has the same stretch. If the rest of the pattern is not rib, it probably will look weirder.