Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

I realize I've been rather un-chatty the last few months. So, what has been happening? The autumn knitting did not all go according to plan. I started off with a plan to have a new class on short rows. Gabi suggested I pick a good project to sell the class, so I chose "Dreambird KAL" by Nadita Swings. There are over 3000 of these on Ravelry . It is a popular pattern, and I figured I would just knock mine out over Dragon*Con weekend. Well, it turns out this is not the easiest pattern to follow. There are a couple places in the pattern where people are making tweaks. I think I started and ripped this thing three or four times before I finally figured out what I liked. The pattern is worked in feather-like sections I call a "quill." Each quill typically took 2-4 hours for me to knit, depending on how much I concentrated and whether I made a mistake and had to rip back. My shawl has 21 quills. But, the final project is flattering. In the end, I completed re-w...

I’ve been wanting for awhile to write a review about Lynne Barr’s book, Knitting New Scarves (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2007). I typically buy my knitting books in local yarn stores, but I bought this one last year while browsing at a big box store. And I wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't browsed through it, read a pattern or two, and realized what this book really is. I hadn’t seen it before or read anything about it in the knitting magazines. When I see “scarves” in the title of a knitting book, I think this is a book for beginners. After all, scarves are beginner-level projects, right? And there are several scarf books available that are just that. But Knitting New Scarves is not a scarf book and it is not a book for beginning knitters. If you like the work of Norah Gaughan, Cat Bordhi, or Debbie New, you need to see what Lynne Barr is doing. This book is basically a series of interesting knitting experiments. Some of the techniques are quite unusua...