I bought Gwen’s Lake Monterey pattern to learn the construction of this beautiful sweater; I couldn’t quite figure out how the raglan sleeves would evolve from the entrelac body. I ended up figuring it out through trial and error as I used sport weight yarn at a different gauge from the pattern, so I reworked the body calculations based on equivalent measurements. This was a great way to learn more about the nature of bias-knit fabric (bigger than you’d think!) and entrelac sweater construction. I used skills from Gwen’s Craftsy class on entrelac.

Gauge before blocking: 6.6 sts & 8.5 rows per inch in St st
Gauge after blocking: 6.17 sts & 9.16 rows per inch

With long tail CO for ribbing, I cast on 240 sts to work 15 LBTs (divisible by 4 for 2x2 ribbing).

RR: Picked up 11 sts (PUP, PUK across), worked in seed st.
PUP/PUK half a stitch, worked with right leg in back (oriented “wrong” on needle) so sts were twisted (tighter) when knitted/purled. (I did the first 2 RRs normally and they were a bit holey.)

LR: PUK along the seed st edge. Picked up not the purl bump that covers the whole stitch, but the tight loop to the right of it (see pic) and knitted into the back loop.

Waist shaping: I used the shaping lesson in Gwen’s Craftsy class and decreased one stitch in each unit for tier 5 or 6. I didn’t increase back to the original for the bust because I had an uneven number of units, so with 8 units in the front and only 7 in the back, I already had plenty of bust room.

Sleeves: Since I veered from the written pattern and also wanted to avoid knitting separate sleeves that had to be sewn onto the sweater, I decided to engineer the sleeves top-down, connected to the raglan lines formed by the entrelac. It might (or might not) have been easier if the pattern had included a schematic for the sleeve as designed; the schematic only had the sleeve attached to the body, so I couldn’t quite imagine the shape I was aiming for. I agonized over how to increase as needed in ribbing, then decided to work the sleeves in St st with a ribbed cuff (and neckline, as the written pattern does).

I spent many hours of trial and error working out exactly how to knit the sleeves. After trying and frogging short rows, incs/decs, and several versions thereof, the simplest approach worked, looked, and fit the best (and I realize now that ribbing would have been simple, but I am not frogging the sleeve I have again!):

With 3.25mm needle (so fabric would have more structure, holding the weight of the sweater): PUK corner of entrelac unit, CO 32 sts using cable CO, PUK corner of entrelac unit.
Row 1: work across in St st, PUK st on entrelac unit to join sleeve to armhole.
Rep Row 1 (PUP on even-numbered rows for St st) until underarm. (Finish picking up/joining to first entrelac unit, seed st, at Row 19, second unit, St st, at Row 41. {74 sts})
Pick up 24 sts at underarm. (98 sts total) At Round 46, dec 10 sts (1 every 9-10 sts?) and start 2x2 ribbing. 10 rnds with 3.25mm, then 10 rnds with 3mm (to shape the ribbing instead of decreasing), then BO with 3.75mm.

I had ladders in my sleeves and used the technique in this blog post by Lunitink to close them up.

Neck finishing: Starting in the middle of the back, with 3.25mm, PUK sts in mult of 4. Work 1 rnd of 2x2 ribbing, then proceed to the front of the shoulder/sleeve and begin short rows back around the back to the front of the other shoulder. (I used Japanese technique as shown in this video.) Work 4 short rows (4 safety pins) each side, then work a full round, closing the gaps (hiding the wraps). Work 6 more rnds all the way around (total of 8 incl. 1st rnd before the short rows and the last rnd to close the gaps). BO with 4mm from the beginning of the rnd (middle back) to where the shoulder begins on the left, then JSSBO with 3.25mm over to back side of right shoulder (just because it needed more stretch than I anticipated), then BO normally with 4mm to the end of the rnd.

Yardage: For the body, each 50g ball of yarn gave me a little more than 2 full tiers.