my Charlotte's Web hints...

For the wonderful baker/person Samantha, who makes melt-in-your-mouth cookies...and for anyone else this helps, the following tricks, taught to me by Stephannie, make knitting a Charlotte so much fun, i did it THREE TIMES.

1. all you need to know is the 8-stitch/8-row pattern repeat sequence [which is charted in the pattern]
and
2. you must put a marker between every repeat of the pattern
and
3. you must put a marker 1 stitch in from the edge on both sides -- you will do a YO on the inside of the edge stitch every RS row, and the marker reminds you to do that
and
4. you must put one marker on each side of the center stitch -- you will do a YO before the center stitch and after it
and
5. you must know what row you're on, from 1 to 16.

That is ALL. If you know that you're always going to do a YO one stitch in from the edge on the RS row, and you know what row of the pattern repeat you're on, you never need to look at the whole pattern. You only watch your 8 sts at a time, you watch the sts build at the edge until you have enough to do a new pattern repeat and then you add in a marker to separate it from the edge stitches. And start again.

The keys to relaxing are to counting rows and to keeping your markers in place. Then it's not counting rows from 1 until 100++, it's 1-16, and then you start again. When you have 9 full pattern repeats [or more or less, depending on how big you want to go] you are done.

I hope this helps. It saved me from hating lace...in fact, I rather love it now. All hail Stephannie!