Brave New Knits

Brave New Knits by Julie TurjomanBrave New Knits is profiles of and patterns by knit bloggers, and in particular those whom the internet helped to knitting-designer success. Many of these are knitters I’ve heard of before, like Grumperina and Ysolda Teague, although I hadn’t read any of their blogs. The book is roughly divided into sections by pattern type – sweaters and accessories – but what makes this book really unique is the in-depth profiles of each of the bloggers. Where most books will give a paragraph at most to each designer, Turjoman includes a lengthy three to four page profile for each designer before the pattern. These invariably made me wish I were reading next to a computer, so I could look at their blog and Ravelry profiles. It also made for a disconnect the couple of times when the profile said that the designer was known for making garments top-down, say, and then the pattern included was knit flat in pieces. There were a lot of sweaters – quite lovely – ranging from quite complicated to simple – and socks, and non-sock projects with sock yarn. The patterns looked quite nice, though I read on Amazon that there are a lot of errata. All in all, I found the patterns nice, but what really interested me about this book was the designer-bloggers and their paths to making a life out of knitting.

Crossposted to http://sapphireone.livejournal.com and http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org .