Coats & Clark

I love these little books. They have been one of the best resources for prodding my memory, or showing new items, nearly all my life. I have three of them, and they are almost exactly the same. Two are marked 29 Cents, and are the Fourth and Eighth Editions. The third is marked 35 Cents, and is the Eighteenth Edition.

There are four sections, divided into Crochet, Knitting, Tatting, and Embroidery. I no longer do Tatting, and have mislaid the shuttles in any case, but it was very helpful when show more I was first learning. All four handwork sections have excellent drawings for how to do specific actions. They're just a wonderful resource.

It seems that this was still published as recently as 1993.

http://www.amazon.com/Coats-Clark-Learn-How-Book/dp/B0015IRR4S/

No authors listed or known. I'm going to use the Amazon "author" (Coats and Clark's designers) but as an editor.

This little pamphlet is probably the best book there is for someone new to handwork, or anyone who is just brushing up. show less

The projects are too sixties to be of much use. However, the explanations are clear and wide ranging. In addition to basic crochet, there are also instructions for making hairpin lace, using afghan stitch, and doing fillet crochet.

Most of us who embroider like stitch guides. Can you have too many? Probably. If you already have a good one, is this redundant? Probably. However, it does tell you the yarn weights of Red Heart yarns to use with which kinds of canvas, a feature you're not likely to find anywhere else. It also has a sampler project with all the stitches in the back, which would be good project to use up small amounts of knitting yarn.

The doily and place setting patterns in this book are exquisite and unusual according to doily books I've seen recently. The designer is not named in this edition (1949) but a later edition reveals Rita Weiss as the designer.