In my world, a book review is a very serious matter, I take purchasing (real) books seriously and finding the space that the book deserves in my house. If I buy the hard back, real book, then it is something that I value. That is how this book, “Knitters Book of Knowledge” came into my possession. It was a grand out of town find, one that I knew from the instant I picked it up that it needed to be mine.
I found this treasure at a yarn shop in Tulsa, shop shall remain anonymous, where I could sit back in a comfy chair and thumb through this gorgeous volume. It was visually beautiful, the pages where eye candy and the diagrams of each knitting process were promising. Maybe I could understand and learn from this book all the knitting secrets that have alluded me and therefore, patterns that I thought I would never do became viable.
Debbie Bliss is an English knit designer that has fiber in her blood. She learned to knit as a child, then it sat around in the back of her head for years. She graduated from a design school and realized that she was unemployable with her degree. She got hook-winked into a knit design, had to go home and have a crash course of knitting with her mom and then her story started.
Now she has many books under her knitted belt, her own line of yarn and a magazine. To watch her in interviews is to watch true humbleness in action. She keeps involved with each aspect of her knit business, really does her own designs and has no ghost people doing it for her in her name. I was amazed at that, so this book is really her book-not a collection of things put together with her name added on it for sales.
I love the vintage feel and look of the book. It is created to look like a designers note book with scraps of papers stuck hither and yon on each page. Yet there is order and clarity on those pages.
The best part of this book is the artist rendering of each knitting technique she covers. It’s not just words and instructions, which often can get confusing in the language idioms. Little terms that get confused when they travel over the ocean. The well-drawn diagrams clear up any terms lost in translation.
Nor is the book heavy with tedious words, the diagrams allow the reader to enjoy each page simply because there are pictures. The only complaint I have, and I know that the book can only be so thick, is that I would have loved diagrams of the completed stitch and what it needed to look like. I would have personally found that helpful.
This is a book that should be in every knitter’s library, right there with Elizabeth Zimmerman. Yes, that is saying a lot about Debbie Bliss. Her books, patterns and even her yarn should be a part of your knitting bliss.
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