Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the only class I took at STITCHES South 2016 was "Reversible Entrelac" with Gwen Bortner. It was an advanced class and on Sunday morning. I was a little concerned the class might not make, but we had exactly four people. Whew! Some of you may be wondering why I would take this class. After all, I've already posted the Sir Thomas scarf , which is a reversible entrelac project. But Gwen's approach is different from Jay Petersen's. Always good to survey the range of technique. You'll recall in entrelac you are joining little blocks as you go. These blocks join in two places. When you start a new block, you work up stitches off the side of a block in the previous tier. That is one place to think about reversibility. As you work back and forth on the new block, you also join one selvedge edge to live stitches from a block in the previous tier. That's the second place to think about reversibility. You'll recall f...

On Saturday, I took a class from Gwen Bortner. Gwen was here in town to teach for Atlanta Knitting Guild. On Saturday she taught "Entrelac: Beyond the Basics." I had been out of practice on entrelac, so I did some swatches earlier in the week. Specifically, I tried Jay Petersen's clever trick for joining entrelac. Oh my gosh, awesome! Here's what I did: First, I ran a vertical lifeline up the side of the work. You are going to have to pick up stitches on the selvedge in entrelac, so you might as well trap a piece of yarn as you turn. When you need to pick up the stitches, they are then already there on the waste yarn and you don't have to hunt for them. Second, I used Rick Mondragon's technique for modular intarsia. Jay is the clever person who realized you could use Rick's technique to make entrelac lie better. Instead of working ssk or p2tog to join a new unit to a unit on the previous course, pull up a loop in the live stitch. Knit out with the l...