Books

I picked up "Toy Knits" by Debbie Bliss today. (Well, ok, it came in the mail courtesy of amazon.com.) The toys in it are adorable. Two of the patterns are blatantly Kanga and Roo, and Eeyore (Classic, of course, not Disney), but that's not really a bad thing. Of course, I'm not the estate of A.A. Milne, but that is neither here nor there. The farm animals are the cutest, especially the pigs with their little floppy ears. There's also a great pattern for a "farm mat," with different squares representing fields, bales of hay, stables, etc, and tiny pigs and cows and sheep. Obviously I haven't tried any of the patterns yet, but a couple of things that I noticed - in the Introduction, I was cautioned not to overstuff the toys, because the stuffing will show through. I then proceeded to see 3 examples of overstuffing, in a casual look through the pictures of the finished patterns. I will also be extra careful when I work the noses of any of the bears, because the person who made the patterns in the pictures obviously had a bit of trouble with them - the yarn is stretched and twisted and doesn't blend well with the rest of the bear. Otherwise, the book is really slick and I can't wait to knit a little piggy.

I also received "Yarn: The Things It Makes and How to Make Them." I haven't looked at it really in depth. It was obviously written for some sort of home ec environment, as it was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, which published 90% of my textbooks in high school. The book covers knitting, crocheting, weaving and macrame in pretty good detail, as far as I can tell. No sweater patterns, but you can crochet a skirt out of granny squares, and knit some mittens. The many pictures are surprisingly detailed, and the book covers some things that you might pass over as obvious. For example. For some reason, when I was strictly a crocheter, I couldn't grasp the concept of "make a ring, and then make x SC in the ring," if I was crocheting in the round. It never occurred to me to crochet IN the ring, and I made many misshapen circles. I even spent an evening at Barnes and Noble poring over crochet books, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. If only I had had this book! In short, it's definitely a cheesy book, but it also has some value. The macrame chapter lies in wait!