As discussed on my yarn overs page, lace knitting is where you arrange holes (created by yarn overs) into a pattern. This gives you a more floaty, delicate look to your knitting.

The video tutorial below gives you a brief summary of lace knitting and then shows you how to do the eyelet lace pattern, which is an ideal introduction to lace knitting for beginners.

To create the eyelet stitch, you only need to know how to do knit stitches, purl stitches, k2tog decreases and yarn overs, and it is a very simple 4-row pattern repeat:

First, cast on a multiple of 3 stitches, plus 2.

For example, I cast on 14 stitches, which is 4 x 3 (=12) + 2 (=14)

Row 1: k

Row 2: p

Row 3: k2, *yo, k2tog, k1

Repeat from * to the end of the row

Row 4: p

(Where is p = purls and k = knits)