Comments on: Book review – Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

By: Jani

Jani — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:59:26 +0000

try Knitting in the Old Way http://www.nomad-press.com/Nomad/sub/k_s&toc.htm for more history, it’s great. it seems to be avaliable as a free ebook.

By: leannich

leannich — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:15:18 +0000

@Katherine: That book sounds great. I learnt about tension/gauge some time in my twenties, when I’d been knitting for nearly two decades!

@Magpie: Ah, I’ve heard recommendations for the Reader’s Digest books before. *goes off to add to wishlist*

@Ailbhe: Re Peg Bracken, I just went to look. No sewing, as far as I can see. I’d heard of “The I Hate to Cook Book”, which appears to be being reissued next year, but not the etiquette book or the memoirs. Wow.

By: Ailbhe

Ailbhe — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:25:07 +0000

I dunno. I like Laura Ingalls Wilder, and even the bits in Jean M Auel. I like finding it in my ordinary about-people reading much more than reading it standalone. I think I want to read “The I hate to sew book” by Peg Bracken; I wonder if she ever wrote it?

By: Eternal Magpie

Eternal Magpie — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:25:57 +0000

Oooh. I’ve just popped this on my wish list – thank you!

My favourite craft books are the Readers Digest guides – one for “sewing” and one for “needlework”. Any time I’m unsure about a technique, you can pretty much guarantee that there are instructions for it in one or other of them!

By: Katherine Farmar

Katherine Farmar — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:14:17 +0000

The only craft book I’ve really read is Knitty Gritty by Aneeta Patel — it’s so wonderfully easy to follow for a beginner like myself! I’d looked at a couple of other knitting guides, supposedly for beginners, and found that they launched pretty quickly into territory I found terribly confusing. (“Right side”? “Stitch markers”? “Gauge”? What?) Aneeta Patel has a lot of experience of teaching beginners — she teaches knitting in London — and her approach is to make it as simple as possible, and to identify the places where people get confused or frustrated and give up. For instance, all of the patterns in the book are patterns where tension doesn’t matter, because that way the beginning knitter can get started straight away without having to knit up a bunch of gauge swatches first.

She gives a very good bit of general advice early on in the book:

“You are now learning something completely new that might be totally outside of your previous experience. KNITTING DOES NOT COME NATURALLY! It is easy when you know how, but until then, don’t be hard on yourself… embrace the joy of undoing your work and starting all over again — just remember that you are getting extra use out of your yarn and needles.”

Bearing this in mind has kept me going when I might have given up.