Entrelac diagrams

For the last year, I've been experimenting with entrelac knitting. I find diagrams to be a good way to think about and explore entrelac knitting.

In this post, I'll show how to read my diagrams, assuming you already know how to do entrelac. I'll start with the simplest diagram and build from there.

Here's the minimal diagram to describe a piece of knitting:

The line inside the rectangle represents the grain of knitting. It's sometimes hard to tell the beginning edge from the ending edge of a piece of knitting—especially if the piece was cast off with a sewn cast-off—but with a flat piece, you can always tell which edges are selvedges.

These two diagram elements, rectangle and line, are enough to show the gist of an example of entrelac knitting:

The basic technique of entrelac is to join pieces of knitting end-to-side and side-to-end.

Looking at knitting, especially if it's stockinette, garter, or reverse stockinette, it's not always easy to see the direction of knitting. With entrelac, you're joining many little pieces of knitting as you go, so it's important to keep track of the direction of knitting. I use an arrow to show the direction:

Another thing to keep track of is which side the knitting starts and ends on. I use dots to show this. The diagram below shows a piece of stockinette knitting that starts and ends on a right-side row (when it's knit in the conventional direction):

The one below starts on a wrong-side row and ends on a right-side row:

Now I'll show an entrelac diagram with dots and arrows:

This is the minimal diagram to show how an entrelac piece is knitted. I suppose the dots can be inferred from the arrows, but they make following the diagram a little easier.

To make it clearer, for each square I'll often add a number in place of the dot that indicates how the first row begins, like so:

From the diagram above, you can infer how to work each square:

• Start on a wrong-side and end on a wrong-side row: 1, 2, 7, 12, 13.
• Start on a wrong-side and end on a right-side row: 3, 8.
• Start on a right-side and end on a right-side row: 4, 5, 9, 10.
• Start on a right-side and end on a wrong-side row: 6, 11.

Now, all this assumes that you know how to join entrelac squares.  In a subsequent post, I'll write about different ways to join entrelac pieces.

Charting Marianne Kinzel's "Ladybird" pattern

The "Ladybird Stitch" from Marianne Kinzel's lace knitting books has long interested me. Scroll down to Figure 6 in this embedded excerpt from The First Book of Modern Lace Knitting to see a picture of the fabric:

I have found it useful in graphing my own patterns to sometimes represent groups of stitches that usually are shown as several symbols as one symbol. This has helped me, for example, to un­der­stand better the stitch structure of the “Ladybird” pat­tern. If you replace the “yo, k1-b, yo” group with a single symbol, it makes for a more compact chart that more clearly shows the proportions of the knitted piece. Here’s a graph of the ladybird mesh to show what I mean (edge stitches aren’t graphed correctly):

A full repeat of the ladybird pattern (shown on the graph inside the heavy lines) when knitted really is approxi­mately square. And using the  “yo, k1-b, yo” symbol means that the placement of the yarnover symbols in the chart more accurately represents what is going on in the knitted piece. The “yo, k1-b, yo” group is approximately equal in size to the single yarnovers since the latter are strained horizontally by the sudden decrease in stitches on the rows in which they appear.

Here’s the same pattern when graphed as Kinzel does it in her Modern Lace Knitting books:

Done this way, there’s no way to tell from the graph that the yarn overs form 45˚ diagonals in the knitted piece, or that the proportions of the pattern when knitted are square, roughly the same as garter stitch (one stitch = two rows), though much less dense a fabric! The graph may be a little easier to read, but that is a matter of taste, I think. And on patterns like this one, where the stitch count changes from row to row, one square in the graph can’t equal one stitch. Mrs. Kinzel uses blank squares to address the imbalance.

More of my idiosyncratic charting style here:

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr