About to Turn the Corner….

I never thought I would do it, but here I am knitting Entrelac.  Here’s my progress, I’m about to turn the third corner of my dishcloth.  How did this come about?

As you may know from reading my blog, I’m a gadget girl and I’d rather figure out how to do stuff on my knitting machine than to knit by hand.  Although you can do a faux entrelac on the machine, you don’t get the cool color changes like the hand done version.  And regular entrelac is more time consuming on the machine than by hand.   I had been determined to admire but not attempt.

However, at Sheep in the City, my neighbor was Linda Loeffelholz, who does a bit of designing and was there selling patterns with her son (who is a sock machine guy, and had an old Studio hat knitting machine there…..COOL!!)  So I had a very long time to admire her Entrelac Shawl….it was made of her handspun….one ply subtly shifting colors, the other a nice brown color.  It was quite stunning.

Over the course of the weekend, Linda helped me seal a sale (Entrelac is a great way to show off variegated yarns, especially my rainbows).  It was fairly substantial, so I offered her a yarn she had been admiring as a thank you.  Well, the gracious lady that she is (or perhaps good marketer!) came over with her dishcloth pattern in hand, and proceeded to give me a mini-class in knitting Entrelac.  Turns out that it isn’t as hard as I thought, and the little squares really help you feel like you are accomplishing something!

Linda’s pattern is unique in that the border is knit with the squares so that you don’t end up with blatant stripes from a knit-on-later border.  For the dishcloth, you also do not have to knit any little triangles, which makes it nice for beginning.  I had to trust and follow the pattern for the first corner and couple of rows, but I’m getting the hang of it now and think I can adjust the technique for different stitch numbers if I wanted to fit a yarn repeat in a square.

Of course now my mind is spinning with possibilities for variegated yarn….and just imagine how great a Fillet would work up in this technique….guess I’d better get making some more!  Not sure I’m up for a shawl yet, but I may dye up some cotton in long shifting colors and do another dishcloth.  This one has been claimed by one of the cubs to be a blanket for her doll.

Have you been learning any new techniques lately?  What got you to finally try it?