Entrelac: The Essential Guide to Interlace Knitting

Entrelac: The Essential Guide to Interlace Knitting

Written by Rosemary Drysdale

Gifted by Sixth and Spring Books

www.sixthandspringbooks.com

Reviewed by Audrey Huggett

Entrelac has long represented a rather mysterious realm of knitting for me that, to be frank, is a bit intimidating.  There’s no denying that the woven look of the finished product is an attractive and interesting embellishment to any knitting, but the actual ins and outs of entrelac has always baffled me.  That’s why I was so excited to see a copy of Entrelac: The Essential Guide to Interlace Knitting cross my desk.  This definitive guide provides tons of advice and technique tips, not to mention useful tutorials, about entrelac knitting. 

Rosemary Drysdale does a great job of laying out all the basics of the entrelac knitting technique, and explains exactly why you don’t need to be afraid of learning how to do it.  Helpful step by step photos show each stage of the process of entrelac knitting.  Drysdale does more than explaining how to do entrelac; she also provides examples of entrelac knitted in the round, and how to make an entrelac triangle. One of the sections I found the most valuable was the Swatch Glossary.  The entire middle section of the book was given over to different explorations of entrelac knitting, and the ways that the basic woven look of entrelac can be manipulated.

The last third of the book is given over to a variety of patterns, which naturally all incorporate entrelac elements.  I was happy to see this section; I’ll freely admit that I’ve always been a little puzzled about how one would go about using entrelac in a design, so I was excited to see several excellent of entrelac in action.