On My Wish List

On my wish list is figuring out a way to do entrelac in the round. I figured out how to do it around a square -- the trick is to put two squares next to each other. You can see from the arrows below how the direction changes at the point of the square.

Here is how the entire piece looked.

This was made out of Koigu -- the only time I've ever had enough Koigu to make an entire afghan. Koigu really is lovely stuff.

Anyway, I keep thinking there must be a way to do entrelac around a circle. I've seen and bought patterns where there are a couple of rounds, as in certain hats and felted bags, but they always turn out to be knitted from the outside in. There is no good way to determine how to continue outward.

I thought I'd solved it at one point by thinking about pi shawls -- in theory, I could do one round of entrelac, do triangles to even it off, like when adding entrelac inside of a pattern, like here:

Then when you have a plain round, you double it like in ordinary pi shawls, then you do triangles to start off entrelac, then you do two rounds of entrelac, and repeat adding triangles to get to a plain round so you can double again. In short, each of the levels in the pi shawl contain a doubled number of entrelac rounds.

In theory, it works. In practice, it is tripped up by the dirty secret of the pi shawl: the pi doubling formula only works because of how forgiving knitting is.

Pi shawls work best with lacy patterns. Even plain knitting will stress and strain them. Think about it: at the doubling rows, right above a row is one that contains twice as many stitches. It shouldn't work, really, at least, not without puckering. But the row tension in knitting will even out over the length, so having the stitches a little squeezed and then a little stretched out as you keep knitting doesn't really matter.

However, in entrelac, it does matter, because you are knitting on the bias, and there is far less stretch in that direction. My experiment failed very quickly, because it was too tight.

It still seems to me that there should be some formula for figuring out how many stitches get added to the round as the entrelac circle moves outward, but I haven't figured it out yet. It would still depend on some stretch, since the bottom diagonal half of an entrelac square should be smaller than the top half, because you are moving outward on the circle, but I think over that short a distance, there really is enough stretch so you could simply knit the usual square.

Maybe you add a stitch to each new row of squares so that successive rounds contain larger squares, or maybe you add one stitch for every eight stitches in the square, or something like that. Maybe it will be easier to start with one of those center-in patterns, and then try to work outward after that.

I may have to simply bite the bullet and just improvise, and see what happens. Maybe from there I can come up with a recipe, perhaps even a formula.

Hmmmmm. Maybe after the current one.....maybe maybe maybe.