When worked with fine yarns, knitted lace looks like the most delicate, ethereal thing. When you look at it, it seems like something impossibly complex to knit. While keeping track of stitches can be a bit of a trick, lace knitting isn't much more than an arrangement of deliberately placed holes in the work.

Okay, that sounds kind of weird, but it's true. Knitting lace is done by adding stitches (mostly via a yarnover) and then taking away those stitches; doing it in a certain pattern will make the lace design.

The Yarnover

Making a yarnover (abbreviated as YO) is easy. Knit to where you want the new stitch. Wrap the yarn around the right-hand needle in the same manner as when you knit the stitch. Then continue on as normal (or as the pattern calls for). And now you've increased a stitch with a yarnover.

(If you're purling and need to make a yarnover, you wrap the yarn in the direction you would if you're purling. That's a good thing to remember.)

A lot of the time, you don't want to add stitches to your rows, willy nilly. So, to counteract the added stitches from the yarnovers, we need to know how to decrease.

Decreases

To keep your stitch counts per row even, every time you add a stitch, you want to take one away. Yarnovers are rather neutral in direction, but the most common decreases lean (or slant). Generally speaking, there are right-slanting decreases and left-slanting decreases. A lot of lace knitting, particularly beginning lace knitting, will only have increases and decreases worked on the right side of the fabric, so we'll focus on those.

Knit 2 Together (K2Tog)

This is your very basic right-leaning decrease, and it's done as you think it would be. When you get to the stitches you want to decrease, you insert your right needle through two stitches on the left needle rather than one. Then you work a knit stitch through those loops, thus decreasing one stitch.

Slip-Slip-Knit (SSK)

When it comes to left-leaning decreases, there are several available, but SSK is probably the most common. When you get to the stitches you want to decrease, slip one stitch knitwise (as if to knit), slip another stitch knitwise, insert the left needle into the front of these stitches, and knit them together.

If you took Knitting the Muggle Way, you may notice a similiarity between this and the Knit-Two-Together bind off. That's not an accident. That bind off is very nearly an SSK bind off.

Slip 1, Knit, Passover (Sl1 K1 PSSO or SKP)

This is another left-leaning decrease, so it serves the same purpose as the SSK, but it looks slightly different. Depending on how you knit, it might work better for you. To make an SKP, slip one stitch knitwise, then knit the next stitch; finally, pass the slipped stitch over the newly knitted stitch, much like when you bind off.

Generally speaking, both the ssk and the skp are the opposites of the k2tog, but you might notice that neither one looks quite as smooth and nice as the k2tog. Don't worry too much about it; it's just the nature of it. The true mirror to k2tog is the p2tog, but it can't be worked on the same side of the fabric, so it's usually not on the proverbial table.

There are other types of decreases, where you decrease more stitches at once, but these three decreases plus the yarnover will give you a good foundation for lace knitting. Besides, once you conquer the basic idea of these, the other ones will come easily, and most patterns will explain how to do them. So, you should be set!