Life as a Spectator Sport

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Saturday, August 25, 2007

Is this not cool!

This is the beginning of a Garterlac Dishcloth (entrelac in garter stitch, in other words), in Lily Sugar'n Cream dishcloth cotton.

I started an entrelac vest years ago when entrelac was first introduced, but it disappeared into a box when I moved back home from Shelley's apartment, and hasn't surfaced yet. It'll turn up one of these days and I'll be able to finish it, but in the meantime, I'm having fun with this dishcloth.

Entrelac is amazingly simple, given the apparent complexity of the finished item, and since garter stitch entrelac is completely reversible, you don't have to be such a perfectionist about the edges where you pick up each sections stitches.

The only problem with entrelac is that all the stitches of each module (a module being a square or triangle) are active at the same time across a tier (sometimes called a layer). Since each tier or layer consists of whole blocks or triangles of stitches, not just rows of stitches, it can be hard to spread a piece of entrelac out until it's finished. Spreading this one out required fiddling with the cable of the circular needle until the piece was approximately flat, and then aggressively pinning it to the seat of my office chair to take its picture. Such a picture would not have been possible if I'd been using straight needles, and in fact, this 29" circular was almost too short for comfort.

Dishcloths are wonderful swatches for new techniques, or for playing with a new yarn, and when you're finished, you have something you can use, or can put away for a gift (which is where this one will be going, as the dishcloth I crocheted last year stubbornly resists wearing out!)

And on a completely different note, though equally cool, is this spider climbing on the driver's side mirror of my car. I can't identify it for sure, but it seems to be a crab spider, sometimes called a flower spider. Info on the web says they can change color from this dazzling white to yellow or tan to blend in with whatever flower they are sitting on. This one turned up in the middle of a concrete parking lot, so it must have been lost. I had returned to the car after doing an inspection, and as I started to shut the door, I saw this spider swinging from a length of silk, swinging back and forth through the window that I was about to put up. In another moment, I'd have had it in my lap, and then it would probably not have survived long enough to have its picture taken. I'm not arachnophobic, but it would have been disconcerting to have this thing crawling on me. With it safely on the outside of the car, and me safely on the inside, I could admire it much more objectively.
posted by Liz @ 9:09 PM     |


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