I've been knitting lately...

I have been taking a sample Entrelac sweater with me to seminars that doesn't fit me anymore (I made it when I was bigger).  After all this time, I finally got around to making a new one to fit me!

This is from my Wear Your Diamonds book, which has Entrelac yoke sweaters for men, women, and children for mid-gauge and bulky machines. 

As we say in Texas, this is not my first rodeo!  I knitted quite a few of these in the course of creating the book and the video, but surprise - I hadn't knitted one of these in several years, and I had to reread the instructions carefully.

This is a round yoke sweater, which is a variation on a basic raglan.  I love the look of round yoke sweaters, and these have a strong graphic design that I especially like with the contrasting colors and the changing block sizes.  This yarn is Brush Strokes, a soft acrylic with a little alpaca.

You start with the yoke, using waste yarn at the bottom, then making triangles for the bottom of the yoke, then the rounds of different sized blocks. 

The big problem with having a sweater that is part Entrelac and part stockinette stitch is that the Entrelac is very, very wide compared to the stockinette. I came up with a way to greatly reduce the number of stitches for the yoke compared to the sweater, which is done in the setup triangles.

When the yoke is done, it's rehung upside-down on the machine for the body pieces.  This photo shows the short-rowing which makes the body fit properly with the round yoke. 

The front, back, and two sleeves are all different, because to have a good fit, the front neckline must be lower than the back neckline.  The whole yoke is placed lower on the front than the back, that is, the body is modified to make the neckline sit lower. I marked the inside center back of the yoke with a few stitches of the medium gray yarn, so I can easily find the right way to pull on the sweater. 

Today I finished assembling the sweater.  I found this fabric rather difficult to sew, since the yarn has hairy strands that make it hard to see individual stitches.  I put in and removed the first seam a couple times, and then got a very bright light to shine right in my lap, which made it much easier to see the stitches.


The color shows up best on the photos of the sweater hanging on a door.  In the close-up, the flash washed out the color a bit, but I'm including it so you can see the texture.  I didn't block the sweater at all, preferring to leave the three dimensional texture of the Entrelac diamonds.