Entrelac Scarf

In October my friend Maxine taught Entrelac knitting at our Knitting Guild.  This is something I've long been wanting to learn and was excited when she told me she was going to be teaching it.  She actually told me she was going to teach it in October waaay back in March.  Yeah, it was a long wait but definitely worth the wait.  We used the pattern Watercolor Dreams by Mara Lloyd to learn the technique.  Mara's pattern very clearly lays out the steps to knitting an Entrelac scarf.  There is also a nice diagram that points out how the scarf is constructed.  Essentially the scarf is composed of a series of triangles & rectangles that you knit one at a time.  It starts with the base triangles (only knit at the beginning, thus why they are called the base triangles) and then follows right side triangle, left sloping rectangle, left side triangle, and finally right sloping rectangle. 

The first thing though is to cast-on.  Now with Entrelac, it's important to cast-on very loosely.  Just imagine what you consider to be a loose cast-on and then think even looser.  Maxine suggested using either a much larger needle OR to hold both of your needles together and cast-on using the long-tail cast-on.  I used the two needle held together method.  The cast-on was indeed loose and I was wondering if it was going to work out but decided to trust it.  The cast-on I did turned out to be just perfect though it could have been even looser, to tell the truth.

It's pretty interesting when you first start because you end up knitting it on faith since in the beginning it's hard to see that it's going to actually work.  You end up with what feels like unconnected triangles & rectangles (at least in the beginning) that don't look much like an Entrelac scarf.  But sure enough, as it goes on it all starts to come together.  I had my light bulb moment after going through the steps a couple of times.  I was hooked!  

 

I initially wanted to keep this project as my group knitting project, but I found I couldn't resist working on it at home.  It's a lot of fun knitting because there is a lot going on.  It really kept my interested whether waiting to see what colors were going to come up in the yarn or telling myself "just one more triangle/rectangle".  Of course it was never just one more.  One more led to one more and so on and so on.  

Project details: Cast-on 10/3/11; Cast-off 11/1/11; Yarn: Noro Silk Garden Lite from stash (2 skeins); Colors: browns, greens, & blues;  Size US 7 needles.  The only modification I did was to cast-on 16 stitches instead of 24 stitches.  This made a narrower scarf and accommodated for only having 2 skeins of Noro.