Slip Stitch & Entrelac

While working on an Entrelac back pack, I had an 'aha' moment. The bag was knit in the round using Entrelac rectangles. The base number of stitches is 11 and the number or rows work to work off the 11 stitches is 22.

In Entrelac, you are normally working twice the number of rows as you do stitches to join the interwoven pieces together, which means that when beginning the next rectangle, the knitter needs to pick up one stitch for every two rows.

I knit one of Maie Landra's wonderful geometric creations well over a year ago. I remember how easy it was to pick up the stitches for the next square, because Maie always has the knitter slip the first stitch.

In the middle of working on the knapsack, I began to wonder why I could not do the same with Entrelac. On the 'pick up' edge, why not slip the first stitch of the row, rather than work it. In that way, on the next round, I would have 11 chain stitches waiting for me. Up to this point, I had to be sure that I was picking up a stitch from every other row.

I started to slip stitch the first stitch of the 'pick up' edge on round 5 of the bag to create a chain edge. At first, I would forget on some rectangles and remember on others. By the time I finished round six, I realized how easy having the chain edge made picking up the edge stitches. Wonder of all wonders, I couldn't tell the difference between the chain edge pick ups and the every other row pick ups.

I am sure that I am not the first person to have made this extrapolation, but since it is new to me, I wanted to share it with you.

By the way, an Entrelac project is the perfect project on which to practice knitting back.