Tag Archives: entrelac

Knitting 9-1-1

Okay, it’s not really an emergency; I’m just helping. I made a felted entrelac tote last year, and my knitting group took it up as a learning project. There’s one that’s not quite done. I feel slightly responsible because I introduced it, so I offered to help Sharon get past the last triangles so she can get on to the round bottom of the bag. She just doesn’t get enough time to knit. I love her colors; they are outside my usual palette. I finished the triangles last night, and now it’s on its way back to her.

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Here’s another bit of 9-1-1: The emergency knitting bag. Turtlegirl posted about this on her blog, and it was impulse buy all the way for me. You can get yours here. It’s the perfect size to leave in the car with a sock or washcloth project tucked inside.

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I cast on for the Josephine Top, after a bit of swatching. I swatched flat, but decided to knit this in the round, so who knows if I’m getting gauge? Too early to tell, but it’s pretty and this will be a very big gauge swatch.

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Isn’t it pretty on the weeds in my back yard? The true color is somewhere in-between these two pinks.

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Entrelac socks, redux

I had tea with Anna on Monday. She’s cruising along on the entrelac socks.  The first is done, and the second is halfway there. A completed first sock means that the pattern is readable and knittable, so the entrelac sock pattern is ready to be published. It’s now available on the sidebar.

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Anna says that she only knits with dirt-colored yarn. I think it’s good looking dirt! Although we prefer to say, “earth tones.” We bought this yarn at Coastal Yarns in Cannon Beach, Oregon during Crafty Moms Weekend in February. I bought some in variegated blues. It’s Hacho hand-dyed merino wool, DK weight, from Mirasol Yarn, spun in Peru. Yum. I’m trying to finish the Shetland Triangle shawl before I jump into another pair of these socks, but the siren song is strong.

 

Entrelac love

The first time I fell in love with entrelac, I was looking at Kathryn Alexander’s amazing entrelac socks in Spin-Off’s Socks book (1994 Interweave Press). But it was about 10 years ago, and I was nowhere near ready to try something so ambitious. I was also afraid of skinny yarn at that point. Consider it an entrelac flirtation.

In 2006, I received a gift of handspun from BeeLady, a friend on a piano forum (and now Ravelry, too). We had both made baby gifts for another forumite, and BeeLady sent me some yarn she had spun and dyed. I found the perfect project for it, the Felted Entrelac Tote from knitpicks.com. There’s just enough entrelac in this project for a beginning entrelac knitter.

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side after

I was completely smitten. So smitten that I made three more as gifts, with yarn from knitpicks. That wasn’t quite enough to satisfy my burgeoning entrelac affair. I wanted to design a small project, something to take with me on a trip to San Antonio. This ear band pattern is the result:

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But I still wanted a sock. I couldn’t find a pattern that matched the sock of my dreams, so I made my own. It’s not the many colors of fingering weight yarn wonder that first caught my eye, but it makes me really happy. Sport weight yarn, variegated so the yarn does the work and I don’t have a million ends to weave in.

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My friend Anna is test knitting the pattern for me. Thanks, Anna!