The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly...

...Today focusing on The Ugly.

One promise I'll make to my readers is to share my crafting failures as well as my successes. Over the weekend, I tried my hand at entrelac knitting. As I mentioned before, I'm not an expert - or even an advanced - knitter. Advanced beginner, maybe so entrelac represents a rather significant challenge.

As you can see from this photo, which is surely not the product of my efforts over the weekend, entrelac is a very beautiful technique. I started out using instructions I found at About.com, which, although very detailed, weren't quite detailed enough and I was soon hunting for instructions on how to purl into the front and back of a stitch (PFB), which sounded simple but for some reason wasn't simple at all.

I searched a bit more and soon found this video which led me to Criminy Jickets and the garterlac dishcloth pattern. (And doesn't it just figure that I would discover that excellent blog just as it goes into a possibly permanent hiatus?) Since the dishcloth was knit all in garter stitch, I decided to give it a try, figuring at the very least it would give me a chance to pick up the feel for the pattern without having to struggle with those pesky PFB stitches.

I did manage to produce a serviceable dishcloth but, like I said at the beginning of this post, it's not pretty. Do you remember your first attempts at knitting? When you were nine years old? My dishcloth resembles it.

All in all, I wouldn't call this a failure, but it is something other than a resounding success. I'm going to keep trying until I perfect this technique because it's just too cool to pass by.