All yarn was held double.

This project seemed like a good way to use up some of my challenging deep stash Wollmeise multis. I’m marling them with calmer colors and I am just delighted with the effect. These unlovely skeins evoke the good ol’ days of WM shopping when you were happy to get anything at all, which makes me love them all over again. And they look beautiful with a little counterbalance.

No advance planning here, except for gathering a bunch of skeins that seem, vaguely, to work together. I’m spending way too much time knitting on this because I cannot wait to see what I’m gonna use for the next stripe! It probably would have made sense to swatch some combinations, but we all know that wasn’t gonna happen.

I’m using repeated stripes, at irregular intervals, of a gray-blue marl as “control rods” to keep it from being visually overwhelming.

Also, I had forgotten how much fun it is to knit entrelac! Once I re-learned how to knit backwards, it became a happy experience indeed.

Definitely learn how to knit backwards for this project.

This pattern does not hold your hand. It gives you all the info you need to get it done, the numbers are accurate, and it offers quite a good, simple explanation of entrelac, but there is nothing extra. It could use a few more photos, showing details like the triangles where the sleeves attach. An experienced knitter will be okay with it, especially if you’re a problem-solver type, but a beginner may be overwhelmed.

Modifications:

Because I hate a tight crew neck, I modified the neckline to be lower and wider by starting neck shaping one stripe sooner than it starts in the pattern, and making three of the flat triangles in the middle instead of two. I also didn’t do any binding off; I just kept going back and forth across the flat triangles. This meant working some of the triangles at the edges opposite to how they were written.

This gave me a very wide neckline, but then I overcompensated with too many decreases, and it was fine but not what I wanted. I ended up unpicking the tubular bind off and frogging back at least half the neckband, then reknitting it with fewer decreases and fewer rows altogether. I like it much better now. And there is nothing better than a tubular bind off. Such a beautiful finish!

I didn’t bind off the shoulders either. Instead, I joined the live stitches with a 3-needle bind off from the RS so the “seam” showed.

Worked eight entrelac stripes instead of nine for the sleeves and finished them as written.

I didn’t do anything with the bottom hem. It reaches nearly to my knees, so adding any length would just be ridiculous. I quite like the look of the half triangles making up the edge. I may add applied i-cord if it seems to need something after blocking and wearing it.

For blocking, I did my usual superwash garment block: I washed it in the washer and dried it in the dryer. It came out beautiful!

++++++++++++

Setup triangles: Aspen Tree, Maus Alt
First full ‘lac rnd: Fred 28g, Piorko Pure 32 g
Second ‘lac rnd: Boboli + Hamam
3: vergi + Harmonista 67 (rainbow)
4: aspen tree + limone
5: Josephine + Fred
6: aspen tree + RS 28 (pink-orange)
7: rittersporn + harmonista 67 (rainbow)
8: Absinthe + mamba samba
9: Himmelblau + Tiefer See
10: Fred + Josephine
sleeve split
11. Gesund + aspen tree
12: Maus Alt + RS 28 (pink-orange)/ RS 28 + Kurbis Med
13: Fred + Josephine
14: Absinthe + harmomista 67 (rainbow)/H 67 + mamba samba
15: Rittersporn + Vergi
16: himmlisch + turkis
17: fred + josephine

Sleeves:
1: Fred + josephine
2: Kurbis Med + Tandoori masala
3: Gesund + Himmlisch
4: Turkis + Aspen tree
5: Limone + Mamba Samba
6: Rittersporn + Vergi
7: RS 28 + Harm 67
8: Absinthe + Hamam

Gesund Twin 168g and 42g and 36g
Piorko Twin 162g
Tiefer See WD Pure 168g
Piorko Pure 13g and 36g
Vergißmeinnicht 163g
Maus Alt 58g
Hamam 111g
Boboli 100g

Fred and Josephine are both turquoise/gray/black speckles. Fred is more blue and Josephine is more green.