On Saturday morning, Myria invited me to come over and look at something on her desk.

There’s no doubt these are Jade’s footprints; they’re way too small to have been made by Goldie’s hooves :)  She doesn’t get up on the desk very often but, apparently, some time Friday night she got curious about something, jumped up, traipsed through the dust behind the monitor and then exited via the mouse pad.  Of course this may say more about my (lack of) housekeeping skills than I would prefer but the footprints were so cute that I had to share.

I have been obsessing again - of course!

About entrelac :)  Anybody surprised?  Heheh…

I have been trying to find out about the origin and history of the technique.  I discovered two one-sentence references to entrelac being a Finnish technique (and saw it referred to once as Finnish Basketweave) and that’s about it.  I managed to find the Finnish word: konttineule, but using it as a search term only brought me to Finnish knit-blogs - of which there are many.  Though they presented much beautiful work, there was no history of entrelac, no story of origin.

Also, evidently, Finnish nouns are required to be at least a half-mile long.  While it’s entirely possible that I may learn enough terminology to, say, follow a Finnish pattern (have you seen the Finnish on-line knitting magazine - Ulla?), I don’t expect to be speaking it any time soon :)

I still have a few things I want to check out, but if anyone who happens to read this blog can point me in the right direction, would you please?  I can live with almost anything but an un-satisfied curiosity :)

Now, back to the footprint thing…

Since I seemed to have cat feet on the brain (and when Goldie climbs up to roost on the back of my chair that becomes a literal rather than a figurative!), I went looking for paw print lace patterns.  I found two with possibilities.

This pattern is adapted from one that was done in garter stitch - I think the stockinette version looks nicer.  It’s the newer of the two versions and is more the kind of thing I had in mind.  The other…

...is based on an old Shetland pattern.  The knitting of it (after a bit of fiddling around, of course) didn’t give me what I was looking for but did produce a rather nice pattern.  I was trying for a…well…a cat-leaving-dusty-footprints kind of effect and had staggered the repeats within the 11 stitch wide area I was experimenting with.  What I got was a sort of zig-zagging garland effect - not what I’d hoped for, but worth remembering for later use :)

Lastly, there’s this which I found here in Jennifer Fleury’s Cat’s Face Lace Socks...

I’d had the thought that the face and the first paw print above might combine well in an entrelac presentation.  Initially I was thinking about a lace scarf but the designs seem a bit whimsical for that.  Perhaps a child’s blanket?  Definitely something I want to play with :)