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nyalisa-landale · 7 years ago

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a bit about crochet entrelac

s2g, half the reason I rarely post long posts is because this stupid hellsite and its frankensteined chimera of an app EAT THEM BEFORE I CAN FINISH WRITING THEM.

but anyway. ANYWAY. let's talk a bit about crochet entrelac. (take two.)

entrelac is some fancy fuckin french word that means interlocked/interlocking/some such bullshit. knitted entrelac, which came first, usually looks something like this:

cool. this is stockinette entrelac, which most entrelac usually is because it looks fucking rad. (fun fact: the reason it looks like that is because of stockinette stitch's tendency to curl in on the sides. since in entrelac the sides are all connected to something else, this makes the rest of each section sit a little bit higher.) you can also knit entrelac in garter stitch, which looks like this:

which is significantly less rad. (garter stitch is a Balanced Stitch, whereas stockinette is Unbalanced, but we're talking about crochet today so let's not get into that. all it means for our purposes is that garter stitch lies flat.)

"but azu, I thought we were talking about CROCHET entrelac."

yes, we are. but it's important to know the kind of look that crochet entrelac is trying to mimic - or at least the type of construction that it's trying to mimic, since crochet entrelac actually looks like this:

visually it's more similar to garter entrelac than stockinette entrelac, which is why I showed y'all garter entrelac in the first place. although the reverse side looks like the reverse side of stockinette entrelac (that is, reverse stockinette stitch). it has something else in common with stockinette, too: it curls like a motherfucker. observe:

this is more of a problem in the beginning, when you have less fabric; the joined edges don't curl like in stockinette entrelac, as we've seen. the above sample pinned out:

(I'm using a slow color-change yarn; you can see it a little, but it'll be more obvious the more I go.)

afaik this technique is usually used in blankets; it makes for really nice ones, because the fabric is pretty dense. and unlike knitted entrelac, with crochet entrelac you can start on a center square and go around and around, building your piece out from the center, which means you can make it basically whatever size you want. (actually you can start with more than one center square; in the piece above, the top three squares are my center.) knitted entrelac is, imo, more suited to accessories (like scarves) or accents (like a panel on a sweater or sock cuffs or smt).

so how do we create this ~*~miracle fabric~*~? well, you may have noticed that it doesn't really look like any kind of traditional crochet stitch.

that's because it's not. (surprise!) it's actually tunisian crochet, which is a completely different can of snakes, and is something like a cross between knitting and crochet (not crohooking/croknitting, which is also a cross between knitting and crochet but is something else totally different). however, crochet entrelac is actually a pretty good introduction to tunisian crochet, because it only uses the easiest stitch (appropriately called the tunisian simple stitch) and because you'll never* have more than seven stitches on your hook at one time, which means you don't need a fancy tunisian crochet hook to do it.

(*unless you want to. the above sample I'm doing actually has nine max. it still fits on my basic bitch aluminum crochet hook just fine.)

other than the fundamental fucking way that it works, the other difference between tunisian crochet and regular crochet is that you need a much bigger hook than your yarn calls for, to do tunisian.

this was my practice piece, done with the same size hook I'd been using on the yarn for regular crochet. it's one block smaller than the other piece, but it's also comparatively tiny. (part of that is because I did the "traditional" seven stitch five row block in this sample, but still.) for tunisian you really need to go up two hook sizes at least. I actually only went up one hook size between the two pieces because I couldn't find a goddamn J hook (more accurately I didn't have one in my hook case; long story) but it probably looks about the same size as if I had, because I also made bigger squares.

part of the reason you want to use a bigger hook is to mitigate the curl a little; tunisian crochet results in a relatively dense fabric and the looser gauge that the bigger hook results in... I mean, you're never gonna kill the curl completely (until you add in edge triangles, but that's another post), but it helps. the other reason is... also because of the dense fabric; the looser gauge makes it slightly less ridiculously dense. also makes it go faster, because looser gauge = bigger stitches = bigger squares. I may yet start over again with the 6mm hook I wanted to use, just because it's probably going to be better for the blanket.

(or maybe not, because those middle three squares felt like they took fucking forever.)

oh, final note: while I can't give you the magic formula for number of center squares vs the size of blanket you're trying to make (Mikey from the crochet crowd has you covered, and also if I'm making a blanket it's gonna end up being whatever fuckin size it ends up being, and hopefully b i g), I CAN give you the secret formula for how long your starting chain needs to be. you could in theory get away with six chains if you only want one center square (aka a square blanket) but that doesn't work with this formula.

for your basic bitch seven stitch five row squares, you'll need a multiple of ten chains plus one. (11 for one square, 21 for two squares, 31 for three squares... you get the idea.) for every stitch that you add to the width of your square (in my limited experimentation) you're going to need to add an extra row as well, so you increase that base multiple by two. an eight stitch six row square would be a multiple of twelve plus one. a nine stitch seven row square, like I'm doing, is a multiple of fourteen plus one. (for me that meant 42! ...plus one.)

I haven't tested this extensively, because I've got shit to do, but I'm pretty sure it scales.

anyway that's a bit about crochet entrelac, thanks for attending my ted talk, etc etc etc

#azu also crochets #long post is long #probably could have used a few more pictures #but the internet wasnt supplying and ive got shit to do

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