Colorful Knitwear Design

Rating:
Summary: More inspiration than instruction
Review: If you love looking at beautiful original knitting, then you will love this book. Despite never having knit anything from its pages, it is a book I come back to again and again.

The book is arranged into short articles, and each provides its own brand of inpiration. Most of the authors seem genuinely in love with their subject, and there is a lot of valuable information on color choices, patterned knitting, 3-dimensional knitting...almost anything to do with yarn and color.

While almost none of the pieces demonstrated are anything I will ever knit, many of them have provided springboard ideas for my knitting, and occassionally some valuable techniques. Generally speaking though, if you're looking for instruction, look elsewhere - this is inspiration.

Rating:
Summary: Short articles about design and technique for knitters
Review: Threads Magazine used to publish an occasional knitting article. After much hemming (!) and hawing, they decided to concentrate on sewing only. This was a loss to knitters but the Threads publishers have collected the articles into a series of books. Thanks, Taunton Press!

This particular volume has articles on techniques such as strip-knitting, which is back in vogue right now. You make a garment in a series of knitted-together strips that form the shape of the garment by varying their lengths. Each strip can be a different pattern or offset patterns and lends a very nice ethnic look (think mudcloth or other handcrafted textiles.)

There are articles about design techniques such as symmetry, texture stitches with colorwork, some lace and a few intarsia things that look a lot like Kaffe Fasset style knitting. Mostly this book is ABOUT the design and not about the patterns, so if you like to design this is for you. If you are looking for a book of models to knit from patterns, you might be disappointed.