Double or Nothing Patterns: Ferronnerie

This is week 9 of the pattern highlights from my upcoming book. If you like what you’re reading about, please join my preorder mailing list. To read more about why I’m doing this (and why you should join the list), you can visit the Month 5 blog post.

Ferronnerie is worked in Quince & Co Finch, a fingering weight wool.

This is one of those patterns that will probably require an entire chapter of techniques to support it. Like many colorworkers before me, I played a bit with entrelac to better understand this fascinating basketweave-like fabric, but honestly never liked the messy “wrong side” of the work with all its exposed seams. It seemed to me that it was ripe for the double-knit treatment, but there was a lot of problem-solving that needed to be done before I could proceed. After experimenting with a few swatches, I began to understand something critical: double-knitting and entrelac are made for each other! There are all kinds of ways that the two techniques just fall naturally together. I’d go into more detail here but I don’t want to give everything away. I do want to point out one thing here, though. If you’ve ever done entrelac in the round in multiple colors, you know that you do a round of diamonds in each color so you get concentric rounds of diamonds. But if you look at this pattern, you’ll notice that the color changes are radial, not concentric. The hat is still worked concentrically, though. This is a trick that I can achieve because I’m doing it in double-knitting — and I’ll explain it in the book for those who haven’t yet figured it out.

The yarn I’m using here is from Quince & Co, which is super popular lately; when I first stumbled across them at a shop in Maine, the patterns they had were, by and large, done in a single colorway. This seemed a shame to me since they have so many colors and good weights of yarn for colorwork. Since then, their colorwork patterns have perhaps not exploded, but many other designers have seen the possibilities and there are now plenty of colorwork patterns available — not to mention all the patterns originally worked in something else that people have decided to use Quince for instead. Still, I love their yarn and particularly the stitch definition in Finch; I wanted to showcase it with something really stunning, so it was a shoo-in for double-knit entrelac.

The term “entrelac” is derived from a French word for “interlacing” which describes what the fabric looks like when finished, especially in single-sided versions. Double-knitting it sort of flattens the fabric out a bit but the interlaced look is not diminished completely. Because the technique is named in French, I looked for a French word for the pattern’s name. The chart I’d chosen for the colorwork parts is based on a common wrought-iron shape, so I found a term “ferronnerie d’art” which refers to wrought-ironwork. “Ferronnerie” evidently just means “ironwork” — which, since it’s worked in wool, calls to mind another play on words: irony.

This pattern will be available in my upcoming book “Double Or Nothing”. To be informed when the preorder period begins, please join my preorder mailing list. Thanks!