144-square entrelac Menger sponge

Download now or preview on posterous

144 Entrelac Menger Sponge.pdf (77 KB)

This is my magnum opus (so far) of entrelac designs. You can knit an entrelac Menger sponge with squares that lie "on the bias". This will make the sponge less "lumpy" and a little more mysterious!

The first entrelac Menger sponge was made of 72 squares. This new sponge is a "dual" of the original square, in a way. Take each square in the original shape, draw in its diagonals, and erase its edges. The new squares (twice as many) use the former squares' diagonals (well, half-diagonals) as their edges. It's a fun puzzle to figure out how to graph the squares in such a way that I can understand the path the yarn will take to complete the shape. In this case I had to us a lot of distortion to be able to show a complicated 3-d shape on the flat page. The shape is made up of 144 squares that are joined together as you go. The knitted squares are not always shown square on the graph. That's a casualty of the complicated shape... I need to be able to show, most of all, how the squares are connected. There are 8 places on this shape where 6 squares come together to create a complicated corner. This is very hard to show on a diagram! The shape obeys the contstraints I have set for myself for these shapes:

• It is knitted with a continuous thread of yarn.
• There are no sewn seams, and only one grafted seam at the very end.
• Since there are no seams, it is strong and flexible.

While creating the shape I found another constraint I had been using unconsciously:

• Each square has a side that's worked together with a previous square, either through picking up stitches or by joining a selvedge.

I had to abandon this constraint with this shape. Square number 18 is "hanging out in space" when it's done--there are no edges attached to previous squares, just the thread that joins it to square 17. This loosey-goosey state of affairs only lasts until square 19, which joins 17 and 18 to itself.

Posted via email from fuzzyjay's posterous