Books about knitting?

[jackandahat]

What are your favourite books about knitting? Not pattern books, but books talking about knitting - things like Yarn Harlot's books or It's My Party And I'll Knit If I Want To.

What do you like about them?

Any you'd say to avoid? (I know some of that is going to be personal taste, but I'm interested to know why.)

Comments

[untonuggan]

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.