Entrelac

So I’m a frequent shopper now at a local fabric store where the Jedi/Kung-Fu/Ninja Master of Fabric holds court and the place is festooned with many examples of her amazing handiwork.  My Mom also shops there for some of her quilting supplies and fabrics and she frequently mentions one of the scarves she sees there.  Mom never remembers enough of the details to describe it adequately so I know which one she’s talking about.  She just referes to it as “the blue one in the back”.  Um.  OK.  Last week I finally remembered to bring my camera when I went back and got permission to take pictures of all the stuff there so Mom could point out which scarf it was in particular. 

As I went around taking pictures I took special note to look at them all closely.  As I got near the to the last of them I got a bit of a sinking feeling when I noticed one in particular: 

There are actually five scarves hanging there but I was pretty sure I knew which one she was talking about now. To be fair I guess there is some blue in it. Sure enough, that was the one. Take a closer look:

It’s not actually woven, just knitted in a way to make it looks like it is. Very pretty! It also looks really hard. Some searches on the interwebberytubes eventually turned up the term for this kind of thing: Entrelac. Knitterists have developed their own arcane language to describe knitting patterns to each other and I’ve yet to crack this code. Still, you can get some idea of the complexity of a project by looking at the code that describes it. I have looked at the code for an entralac scarf. I tell you know that to gaze upon this is to gaze upon madness itself! And yet this is the next project I mean to try.

Pray for me.