Yo YOs

After work yesterday I went to a Lace 101 class at Knitting Central.
D was teaching it, she does a lot of nice lace knitting and has taught it in the past. (She's also a busy girl and hasn't updated her blog in a while.)
Did you know there are five different ways to work yarn overs, depending if you are going from knit to knit, knit to purl, purl to knit, etc.?
Yeah, you read that right five ways!
I had no clue, which is why I crashed the class. She was showing me some when we were working Saturday and I was dumbfounded.
I won't go into detail here, but would encourage you to take a class at your friendly local yarn store if you have a burning desire to know.
If you can't wait for a class, I believe there was an informative discussion of YOs on that blog let me explaiKnit.
(Which might indicate that I just accidentally lied about not knowing there were five different YOs. Well, let's say I knew there were different YOs, but maybe not exactly five. Do you forgive me?)
But it's so much easier to have someone show you these things.
During class, D discussed the uses of different increases and decreases and the various YOs.
She explained that there are different abbreviations that can be used to indicate just which YO should be worked, but most patterns (American ones, at least) just say "YO." This forces the knitter to decide for themselves, which doesn't offer much help to those knitter who don't know about the different YOs.
Poor YO-less knitters.
Then we made a squidgy little sample swatch, practicing the YOs, and getting a feel for the pattern for the scarf they'll make.
I say they because, as you know, I have way to many deadline projects going on to stop for another scarf at the moment (although it is quite lovely).
Of course, once I started working some of the new/different YOs I actually had trouble working the standard YO. sigh.

Crochet YOs
This knitting business is very complicated, with its five different ways to make a hole.
When you want to make a hole in crochet all you do is work a chain. The more chains you work, the bigger your hole.
Doesn't get much simpler.
Of course, in crochet they aren't called yarn overs, they are called spaces.

Relevance to my life
I'm not sure how this new information will influence my current projects.
The YOs on the Eyelet and Feather scarf are all between two knit stitches.
And the Harf, thankfully, doesn't have YOs at all!
It might all come into play, however, for the scarf I want to make with my Mohair Splash yarn. I would have to look at the stitch pattern I selected to see where the YOs fall.
But that is a task for another day.

Speaking of Scarves
Cynthia was at the store, so I showed her my progress on the Eyelet and Feather Scarf in the Cashmere Sock Yarn in relation to submitting it to the book.
She thought I should go up a needle size. She suggested it would get me more length on the finished piece.
Fortunately there is time to swatch and fiddle around some more. I do have a little over a month before the deadline. I'll probably work on that tonight.
Actually, I have two interviews tonight for my next Yarn Market News article, so I'm not sure how much knitting I'll accomplish.
Last night I didn't get home until 9 pm. As I was pretty fried at that point, I actually wimped out and worked on the Harf.
With the potential needle change for the blue scarf the Harf actually required less brain power!