knitting | Books about knitting?

Like, she discovered knitting after a traumatic divorce, and wrote a memoir of how knitting made her ~live~ again. Her style is engaging, and she's funny in that folksy way that The Yarn Harlot can be funny - but her blog was much better than her book. I'd recommend that you read the blog.

Normally I don't really read books around knitting in terms of say the lifestyle choice, though. It's a bit of a busman's holiday to me.

I love her blog! I'd completely forgotten about her book, that could be worth a look. Thanks for the reminder.

I can send it on. It's not in the best condition, but it's in relatively good shape. I prefer reading knitting blogs to knit books, I think.

That would be awesome!

I'm a big fan of knitting blogs because they're ongoing and tend to be project-oriented, but sometimes I like sitting down and reading what someone thinks about it all, you know?

I can try and get it in the post by the end of the week. I have late shifts this week, so.

Have done - cheers!

I love Crazy Aunt Purl! Yeah, the blog's better, but her books are also really good. (In terms of sentiment, I was having a really tough time my freshman year of college, and they helped. Which sounds crazy, but...you know. Same feelings.)

Because her blog is so comprehensive and vibrant, I found that reading the book was a bit of a let down. She pretty much xerox'ed her blog word for word in the book except for the sex part and that wasn't enough for me to feel as if I'd want to buy a second book.

But, she's a damned good writer, and if she does any fiction, I'm there, but for non fiction, I'm just going to read her blog, you know? I tend to prefer knit blogs to knit books anyway.

I have both her books and while I actually haven't reread them in a while, I know that one reason I shelled out money for the second one was that I liked her enough (from her blog) to want to support her by buying the book.

Someday I will actually get around to getting at least one of the Yarn Harlot's books. (I also prefer blogs, since it's more likely I'll actually read them given that most of my reading time is taken up by schoolwork.)

And it's this one. I tend to find that her other books tend to veer either too mystery magical (she calls non knitters 'muggles' and she's had a book dedicated to thoughts about knitting with pithy verse) or too 'watch me be funny' but the knitting rules is a good balance and in addition to that, she shares wisdom re: knitting pi shawls, socks, et al to the point where I'll just pick up the book just to read the odd chapter or five.

*nods* This is the kind of thing I mean with personal taste - I do like the essay books, but it is a very particular style. I'm less fond of the most recent one because it's got several stories retold straight from the blog, and a few are not knitting related at all - husband/kid type stuff.

Knitting Rules I really like for keeping to check up on stuff - when I'm having my "Ack, am I doing this wrong?" moments, it's handy.

That doesn't sound crazy to me - I think whatever connects for you, connects.

I love the Yarn Harlot's books and have chased my husband around the house, reading bits to him. I've read bits of her essays over the phone to my mother and to friends.

I was disappointed in Sweater Quest: My Year of knitting Dangerously.

It's a neat idea - she sets out to knit one of Alice Starmore's fair isle sweaters and documents the process, but the later chapters are more about name dropping as she travels to visit known knitting personalities to talk about her project and endlessly angsting about whether substituting yarns invalidates the authenticity of the project.

I'm a fan of knitting, and I'm a bigger fan of biting off more than you can chew, and who hasn't looked at Starmore's stuff and thought, Can I climb that mountain? (I've got a tag on Ravelry of doihavetheballs for stuff like that - anything requiring steeking, anything with more than ten colors, anything that requires more than 2K meters of yarn, anyanyanything in threadweight, are you kidding me?), so the idea is right up my alley.

But the second half of the book felt repetitive in her resentment of Starmore's attitude toward her fanbase (Starmore comes across as vindictive and petty and there's got to be a second side to that coin) and self-congratulatory and irritating about setting up artificial obstacles. But that may be rolling my eyes at her insistance on using original yarns and not allowing any improvisation.

Maybe because I call improvisation personalization. Maybe because her obsession with authenticity struck me as an artificial barrier, a created dramatic conflict, a false restriction. I just don't think that she and I knit for the same reasons. Quite honestly, I have heart stopping moments of terror every single time I kitchner; I don't need to set myself a task of hunting down one dye lot of an obsolete yarn to keep interest. Color changes in self striping yarn are interesting enough. I'm easy that way. 8-)

I've read bits of Yarn Harlot out to my housemate - she doesn't knit but she is Canadian.

What you're saying mirrors a lot of the reviews I've seen of that - I thought it sounded interesting so I looked it up, and... yeah, a lot of people loved the first half then wanted to shake sense into her by the second. Someone said it sounded like the writer had got bored of things by the end, and it reflected in the book.

"I just don't think that she and I knit for the same reasons."

~nods~

that's because, she knits to write books

she came to my LYS and was mildly charming, but didn't have more than one note to pipe: out of date yarns!

I really liked the first Mason-Dixon knitting book, "The Curious Knitters Guide". I found it before I found the blog. It is more a collection of short essays with a few patterns thrown in than a full-on story. I also found it to be screamingly hilarious. Their second book, "Outside the Lines", was very meh for me.

What was the difference between the two books? I'd forgotten about that blog, need to add it to the reading list, thanks for the reminder.

The second one didn't make me laugh. :) I'm not all that fond of the blog, either. *shrugs*

Montse Stanley's reference about nearly everything, Knitter's Handbook, is neat for dipping into; I'm not hardcore enough to read it straight through. I enjoyed Richard Rutt's History of Handknitting, at least after the first chapter or two.

Edited (forgot a comma :P) 2011-12-05 19:51 (UTC)

Now I'm curious, what's wrong with the first couple of chapters - heavy going?

Rutt was English, and the first bit is England-centric, which makes sense in a way but is neither historically useful (given that knitting and nalbinding weren't "invented" there) nor supportable by the larger geographic sweep he adduces later in the book. It's as though he took a separate essay and grafted it on, or started writing a different book partway through and didn't go back to harmonize the beginning. *shrugs*

I think I take "books about knitting" in a slightly different direction; I found the first Yarn Harlot book annoying, and I've never been inclined to read any of the bloggers-turned-writers' books ever since. I like more... sociology/history of knitting books, I suppose. Knitting America is nifty, and has historical patterns interspersed with the stories and TONS of ephemera.

One that I *haven't* read yet, but that came highly recommended from one of my anthropology professors, is Yarn: Remembering the Way Home by Kyoko Mori. But if you're looking for lighthearted material, that's not it.

I have to admit, I have never read a book about knitting unless it's a pattern book.

My casual reading tastes tend more towards the science fiction/fantasy genre so I have never really given it much thought.

I read more knitting blogs than books, too. I've read a few of the Yarn Harlot books. They're okay, but kind of repetitive. Knitting Rules might be the best one, especially for new knitters.

I like Elizabeth Zimmerman's books. Those helped me a lot when I first started knitting, to relax and have more confidence, and I found her funny and sensible, as well.

Another vote for Elizabeth Zimmerman. They are my comfort reading. Yes, they contain patterns, but the patterns usually go something like this (I don't have a copy handy so can't quote directly, but you'll get the gist):

One summer my husband and I went fishing. He was in charge of the small boat, the rods and bait and so on, and I was in charge of sitting comfortably, eating sandwiches, and knitting. It being the height of July, I couldn't make anything substantial, but a hat would answer admirably. Having only one type of wool to hand -- a two ply sheep's wool in a lovely shade of brown -- that is what I used, and you can do likewise if you have some available.

Cast on as many stitches as you need, according to the size of your head. Usually about a hundred, but it doesn't matter much, because if the hat doesn't fit you, it will fit somebody. You'll need some ribbing or garter stitch to stop the edge of the hat rolling up, unless you like the edge rolling, in which case knit away! Otherwise, try this easy little border.

[A line or two of actual knitting pattern follows.]

If you mess it up, have a cup of tea. If you're in a boat in the middle of a lake, it would be well to pack a thermos in advance, for you are absolutely sure to run into some kind of trouble along the way, and there is no better remedy than tea and a little genteel swearing, before trying to fix your mistake.

Speaking of mistakes, I never rip back my knitting if I can help it. Here's a trick to fix a small mistake without having to undo all that hard work. You'll need a crochet hook of an appropriate size, and some sharp scissors...

(And then, several pages later, having detoured via a story of her time as a governess to some sort of Norwegian royalty's kids and/or the time she and her husband escaped from the Nazis and/or something about living in a tiny little tenement apartment in New York before moving to the Wisconsin schoolhouse where they eventually settled and/or adorable photos of early 20th century children in Christopher-Robin-like knitwear, there'll actually be a finished hat, which will surprisingly have taught you all the skills you need to knit the strange origami-like sweater in the next chapter.)

If I had to pick one of her books that was the least readable as a non-pattern book, it might be Knitting Without Tears or the Knitter's Almanac, but I am loath to disrecommend even those, because they are still full of all kinds of lovely stories and advice, even if they do have a lot of patterns too.

Edited 2011-12-06 03:07 (UTC)

Also, I found this excellent page of EZ quotes which you might enjoy:

http://bookworm-silkworm.blogspot.com/2008/08/in-her-words-20-quotes-from-elizabeth.html

I was going to go on and on about EZ until I saw this, which is almost exactly what I was going to write! (Except that I love Knitting Without Tears as a non-pattern book; there's just so much inspiration and fun in it! Much less so the Almanac.)

Note however that everyone replying to this thread to date has dropped the last letter of Elizabeth Zimmermann's last name. (They're sometimes miscatalogued as well, just to add to the fun.)

Knit Picks has most of them and is a very good deal when one of their "40% off all books" sales comes around, at least if you live someplace they'll ship.

I've been going through what's in my local library. Another vote for the Yarn Harlot's Knitting Rules!, as well as the first Mason-Dixon knitting book. I'm not sure about the second one yet.

I've been trying to find a good history book that my bipolar brain will let me concentrate on right now, and found Rutt's book unreadable for the time being. One that I'm more likely to come back to is No Idle Hands: the social history of American knitting (note: I didn't get very far, but what I did read seemed promising. see: hypomania)

I also quite enjoyed the intro and story bits behind HatHeads: 1 Man + 2 Knitting Needles = 50 Fun Hat Designs. The author knit something like 200 hats (50 featured in the book), which he designed for their recipients, mainly using colorwork. So if someone liked guitars, they got a guitar hat. My favorite parts were his discussions of how he started knitting, his section on decreases, and the photo of the hat he knit by tying all the bits of scrap yarn together. (Another item on my queue). I wouldn't recommend buying it unless you really like the patterns because the actual "talking about knitting" part is pretty short, but it's really good if, say, you're having a hypomanic swing.

And of course Elizabeth Zimmerman is wonderful.

Edited (fixed tag) 2011-12-06 03:57 (UTC)

My problem is, my knitting dates from the Ikea generation (I learnt to knit in 2004 from Debbie Stoller's Stitch and Bitch) so I'm accustomed to diagrams and pictures breaking it down. Zimmermann has tremendous insights but her writing style is so free wheeling, I never really got the whole how to make your own patterns at all (I have Knitting Without Tears). I know she goes on about knitting continental (no lie, if I had to learn to knit again, I'd knit continental, it seems fast, and I can do that, but I have no desire to reaquaint myself with a new sort of tension, whereas my tension is pretty good, and my stitches are relatively even as they are).

The book that helped me wrap my head around the notion of knitting sans pattern was Barbara Walker- who seems pretty humourless in print, lol.

And I'm approaching from the opposite side - I learned just enough about "this is how you knit, this is how you decrease, this is how you increase" then went off on my own. That was out of necessity and the results weren't the best, but I'm comfortable with how I've ended up now.

One day I'll knit something exactly as the pattern tells me to. One day. (Maybe.)

For me, I need to know how the structure works before I can knit in a freewheeling style. I would have thrown any Elizabeth Zimmermann book out in frustration had I seen it as a beginning knitter. I like having stuff broken down for me. I like knowing how the little bits add up to the whole structure. It's how my brain works.

(Nice Cloak & Dagger icon, by the way!)

Two different non-knitting friends of mine each gave me Knitting for Anarchists but Anna Zilboorg. I did not throw either copy through the nearest window, though I greatly wished to.

Instead I put them in the Goodwill box and donated them.

YMMV but I found it to be an annoying book. I've vowed never to read another "cute" book about knitting again.

Rutt is interesting, as someone else has said, his book appears to be parts of two books kitchenered together. However, his was one of the first, if not the first, books on the history and development of knitting. We've learned a lot since he put pen to paper and while much of what we've learned is at odds with what he writes, he still gets a lot of credit (IMHO) for starting the scholarly investigation of knitting history.

EZ on the other hand, I adore (and not just because she's English as am I).

Overall, I'd rather knit than read about knitting. This is probably because I've been knitting for over 40 years.

Books about knitting?

crazy aunt purl is okay

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If you want the book

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can you pm me your address?

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I've only invested in one book

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I have one yarn harlot book

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Read Zimmermann for the insights, I guess

Re: Read Zimmermann for the insights, I guess

Re: Read Zimmermann for the insights, I guess

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