Advice for people knitting with laceweight yarn

It’s a niche, fine.

At first, I really didn’t get the whole lace knitting thing.  Honestly, I still don’t.  But I have now knitted something with laceweight yarn, which is amost just as good.

Behold, the Glorious New Purple See Through Sweater:

I freaking love this thing. LOVE.  The only problem, really, is that I HATED actually knitting it.

That lovely, light, thin alpaca yarn is SO soft and wonderful, it is just hell to knit with.  So easy to drop a stitch.  So difficult to tell the difference between a purl and a knit (wtf, man, I’ve been doing this for a while–that should not be hard!). It’s not just difficult to hide a mistake in a piece like this, it’s impossible.

Lucky for me, I haven’t looked too closely at it.

Oh, right, the advice.  (You thought this was just an excuse to show off my new thing!)

Thing one: Don’t worry about inconsistencies in stitches.  My sweater looked a mess before I blocked it.  There was all manner of holes and misshapen stitches.  All of the stitches were there (there’s no fix if that’s not the case), but man were they wonky.  One good blocking and now all the holes are the same size, just as it should be!

Thing two: Don’t worry about the finishing.  All of the advice that I found online about weaving in the ends amounted to: Avoid it at all costs.  Well, that’s not useful with this kind of pattern, so I did some pretty standard weaving the ends into the cast-on/bind-off row, and it worked surprisingly well.  If it starts unravelling in the next few wearings, I will definitely let you know.