A Step to the Left

Second half progress:

Closer looks: Top left...

...and bottom left....

It looks rather like a mosaic, doesn't it?

No Yarn Ball Left Behind

My color consultant/friend Sandy came over to help me put color groupings together. I've posted about this before.

Not every beginning becomes a shawl, and sometimes we'll find several yarns which bring each other alive. Instead of putting them back, I'll put them aside for scarves.

Here's a scarf that came out of our last yarn play.

Not much like me -- it was the same pattern all the way around, but it was pretty.

Four different yarns, three rows each, on the diagonal. First row plain, second row decrease on the low side and increase on the high, and last row was a modified star stitch.

These are some scarves still in the cocoon.

I'm glad scarves are still 'in.' They provide some quick color fun.

Moving Around

I've finished one side.

I am liking it.

Here are closer looks.

And a closer look at the top.

And a closer look at the bottom.

I like the pebbly look, and I'm enjoying changing directions. I can already tell that more entrelac will be in my future.

A Touch of Green

Now that the dyeing diversion is over, I'm back to the entrelac adventure.

I've defined how tall and how long -- look above the center and to the top right for an idea of how the final proportions will be. Now I just have to fill in the bits and pieces.

Here is a closer look at the lower right.

I'm using one of my magic balls to knit it.

Even closer:

The streak of green was just for fun.

I found that doing a row like this, in a non-entrelac fashion, meant that occasionally I needed to start a square from the opposite side from where the yarn was. So sometimes I simply knitted an extra row -- it won't be noticeable within the texture of entrelac -- and when that wouldn't work for positioning the yarn for the next square, I carried the yarn loosely across the back, and then knit it in on the first row, exactly like carrying a yarn across the back in intarsia.

This is exactly the sort of thing I love to work out. It goes to the heart of conditional knitting, where you make decisions based on what is in hand.

I can't wait to see how this afghan looks when it is finished. We'll all be surprised!

Dye, Darn You, Dye!

Beautiful and bright in theory.

Here's how it looked after washing and drying:

Not quite like I'd hoped.

My guess is that, even though I soaked the yarn in Soda Ash before adding the colors, and used hot water to mix the dye, there wasn't enough heat on the yarn. I think that I should have carefully wrapped the yarn in the plastic and microwaved it to get brighter colors.

Oh, well, it does look a bit opalescent.

The next adventure was turning it back into plain unplied yarn.

Despite the fact that the Navajo plying should have unzipped, this yarn is not smooth. It was clingy, and in the end it took me an entire day to unzip, unzip, unzip, and then wind.

Here are the final results.

And that is the end of my dyeing adventure. It was a nice interlude, but really I'd rather be knitting!

Where Is Dexter When You Need Him?

I took some time out to play with dyeing yarn, because I was seduced.

I bought this from WEBS, which described it thusly:

Judi & Co Isabella is a railroad-style fashion yarn on a cone. Experiment with dyeing this one. Only the cotton squiggle will take the dye.

The call to my imagination was fatal: only the squiggle? How would that look? I was intrigued.

Now, I don't dye. I don't spin. I limit other fiber crafts because they would cut into my knitting time, and I need my knitting time. So anyone reading this who is a dyer, please understand that I waded into this project in the spirit of experimentation and play, without any intention to be utterly serious.

In other words, I probably made a lot of mistakes which will make you laugh -- and I don't much care. Laughter is good.

First, with a vision of longer color changes dancing in my head, I took the yarn and did Navaho plying, and then plied the ply, and then plied it once more, until I had 'ropes' which were 27 strands wide.

It looks like roving, doesn't it?

The safest place to dye seemed to me to be the bathroom, so I prepared it with plastic wrap.

The bathtub....

....and the sink. It wasn't fun, frankly.

Do you watch Dexter? It has a serial killer who, when he's getting ready to commit his crimes, brings out these large rolls of plastic.

That would have been so useful.

I bought a kit for dyeing teeshirts, and then guessed on adjusting dye amounts for the yarn.

You can see the glasses used for different colors -- it looked like Easter. I poured the prepared dyes into the measuring cup, and then into a bottle with a nozzle.

Here is the 'after' pictures. The first is supposed to be just colorful.

The ones in the bathtub were supposed to be golden/rust colors on the left, and then, if you can see how the yarn is laid out, a mixture of longer and shorter color changes on the right.

Beautiful in theory.

Theory is probably where Dexter lives.

To be continued....

One Bit Solved

Here is where I am now, in knitting a new section with a magic ball of purples.

How about a closer look?

Can you see it? Probably not. Maybe if we were closer.

I figured out how to knit a row all the way across, instead of having to start in the center of a row and knit outwards in both directions.  That just breaks up the color and isn't fun to knit.

The trick is adding a second group of double squares (besides the ones used to turn the corner). I do end up changing block directions, but I change it in the middle of the row and keep going.

It breaks up the every-other-square look of entrelac, but I've decided it's a feature, not a problem.

And it worked. I love solving these little problems.

Spreading Out

First came the extension to the east.

Reaching out, making the way for a diagonal.

Then came a front from the north.

And that's when the weather metaphors ran out, because it took me a while to figure this part out.

The problem was that the entrelac changed directions going from left to right -- it couldn't all be knit in one strip. The trouble spot was where the needle shows below.

Here was the problem.

These segments needed to be knit in different directions.

What I did was knit from the middle to the left, and then I went to the far right and knit from the outside to the middle.

Knitting it in two sections helped me understand the topology a little better. I did have one lesson learned: I picked up all along the ridges, instead of just on one side like in regular entrelac, trying to be efficient. This made it difficult to make sure I was knitting the proper number of rows. In normal entrelac, you know you're done with a square because there are no more stitches to pick up.

Next time, I'll only pick up on one side of each ridge, so I'll know when I'm done without having to continually count. Sometimes being less efficient is being more efficient.

However, I think there's a better solution, maybe an extra row on the left to even it out? I'll look at it more closely on the next row.

This is still a lot of fun!

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

The renovated fish, newly perked up via double stitch:

Much better! Thank you for the suggestion, Kabira!

Here is the completed second row of squares:

And here is the the third row:

Let me show you a close-up of the edge:

And now, confession time. It wasn't until I took the pictures that I noticed this.

I wasn't paying close enough attention, so I ended up making a double-square corner where it didn't belong. I even remember thinking that this row of squares was taking a long time, and that I kept turning corners, but it didn't make me look at what I was doing.

Fortunately, this is easy to fix. I'll move the knitting around on the needles until I get to the incorrect section, then unravel those two squares and knit a correct one instead, and then cut off the extra yarn and tie it off.

Now, if I hadn't discovered it for another row or two, well, that would have been a fix to remember!

Just Around The Corner

Here is the current progress.

There are two rows of entrelac finished. Here's a close-up of the edging.

You may remember that I wasn't totally pleased that the fish in the middle wasn't as crisp as I'd hoped. Kabira in the comments suggested I use duplicate stitch.

What a great idea!

I've started an outline in duplicate stitch around the fish, and then I'll use the technique inside the fish.

It's working. Thank you, Kabira!

Here is how I am turning the corner in entrelac.

The red 1 and 2 are the corner squares in the earlier row. You'll notice that the two squares are going in different directions.

The green A is the first square in the corner in the new yarn. It is knitted just like any square, but just knitted back and forth, not connected to another square. It has the same number of rows as any square.

When square A is finished, you pick up along the side in preparation for knitting a square between it and square B in the previous row.

I put a line along where I picked up, because it isn't easy to see here with the way the needles distort the shapes.

Here is the final B square for the corner, as well as the directions of the knitting for each square.

You can see that the squares at the corner in the two rows of entrelac are all perpendicular to each other.

From here, it becomes regular entrelac again. To sum it up, first you knit an unachored square, pick up along the side and continue in regular entrelac.

Once you know how to turn the corner, you can do entrelac around squares, rectangles, and, as I think I will do later in this one, in chevron shapes.

This is going to be fun. I'm excited to figure it out.