Karen Hemingway

My search for a good, affordable, and useful-to-me stitch dictionary is pretty well known. I'd complained to my good friend enough over the past few months that she finally broke down and sent me a copy of her favourite book (by way of Amazon, which was not my plan when I started my complaints). It's quite good and I see why she likes it. It improves upon many that I've looked on over the years: beautiful technical drawings highlighting advanced techniques where appropriate, gorgeous clean show more photos, indication of reversible patterns, and lots of extra space upon the page.

However, for me, it is not perfect. I find these imperfections fairly minor at this point in my knitting life, and I aim to eventually improve upon my copy of this book. How? First and foremost, charts are only provided for the most complex of cable patterns. Since I prefer knitting from charts, this makes me very sad. I plan to take advantage of the blank spaces on the pattern pages and paste in charts where and when I want them. I don't have much experience currently in complex chart writing, so this will be a fun and appreciated exercise. Additionally I'm sad that there is a "how to knit" section. I personally prefer that section separate. It is not spiral bound, which all and all is not a big deal as the spine (sorry my book spine purists) appears to crease easily and it should lay flat soon. And lastly, the various moss and seed stitches are spread out over several pages. I would have have grouped them together so that the various minute changes in the stitches could be shown in comparison more easily.

All in all, it's a very well thought and designed book. I do wish the photographer(s) were given credit on the cover, they deserve it! show less

I love this book. I use it all of the time. It's very rare that I'm knitting and that this book isn't close by.

I like to do a lot of "original" knitting so I'm always looking for a different stitch to add that special something to my knitting. I think every knitter should have a copy of this book. It's great for beginners and pros as well. There is enough of a selection in the types of stitches that you can do something different every time that you knit.

This is the first book of stitches I ever bought after learning how to knit in Spring 2009. I cherish it, but I would have liked a listing of the yarns used for each of the stitches used. I appreciate the way the author categorized the stitches as ribs, eyelets, ornamentals, cables, etc.

RF-Reference