Varying the ribbed-entrelac hat

In the previous post, I described how I diagrammed the ribbed-entrelac hat, showing you the steps involved in figuring out how to knit an entrelac piece with a continuous piece of yarn.
For that hat, I used an entrelac square that was 15 stitches wide, in a ribbing formed with (k5, p5, k5, p5, k5). Each square is 15 stitches wide and 31 or 32 rows long.
Recently, I designed a fabric that uses 6-stitch, 13-or-14-row squares. Each square is ribbing with 3 knits and 3 purls. The squares come together in such a way that the fabric is reversible, and the knits and purls create a hound's-tooth check. I'm pretty happy with the way the fabric came out, and now I want to use it in a garment. I figure I can adapt the entrelac-ribbing hat I just made to use this fabric.
I can make the reversible hound's-tooth check entrelac with any square that is half-knit, half-purl ribbing. So, if I chose to, I could just use the same diagram I used for the first hat, and use (k7, p7) or (k8, p8) for the squares. But that would make the symmetry of the hound's-tooth motifs too hard to see (except in a larger garment like a sweater).


I decided that I would rather use k4, p4 ribbing, which would mean I could subdivide the squares in the first diagram and get approximately the same shape and size of the first hat. Four of the new squares will fit in each of the squares in the first diagram, like so:

Next, following the same procedure as the previous post, I take this diagram and indicate the grain of the knitting for each square.
That ends up looking like this:

Next, I figure out what order to knit the squares in and how the yarn travels from square to square.
I used Skitch to overlay arrows and colored lines on the last diagram, to show the "rings" of squares that I will knit to create the hat. The inner ring is green, next ring is blue, then green, etc., alternating outward. The colors only serve to distinguish the "rings." I don't intend them to represent colors on the finished piece.
One thing I didn't realize until I finished the diagram is that, while coloring the outer edges of each ring with the same color as the arrows that show the direction of knitting, I leave some edges uncolored. These edges only show up on "increase" rings, and if you count the edges they tell you how many more squares there are on this ring than the previous one.
For example from ring 0 (nothing, the very beginning) to ring 1, there is an increase of 5 squares (from 0 to 5). From ring 1 to ring 2 there is another increase of 5 squares (from 5 to 10). From then on, there are no more increases, and each subsequent ring is 10 squares. What this means is that once I finish ring 4, I can keep repeating rings 3 and 4 indefinitely to make the hat as long as I want.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Diagramming and Designing an entrelac piece (fuzzyjay.blogspot.com)
• Ribbed-entrelac hat (fuzzyjay.blogspot.com)
• Fuzzy Logic: Ribbed-entrelac hat (fuzzyjay.posterous.com)