Compare and Contrast

So I got a box of books in the mail today...(Oh, and I also got some yarn that I'll tell you about in a bit)...and among them were two stitch dictionaries. One was this one:

And the other one was this one:


And looking at the two of them at the same time makes for a striking contrast. This similarities? Well, they both have only written instructions, not charts. They are both full of patterns. And there the similarities end.

The Interweave book is beautiful, as the Interweave books tend to be. It seems to be bound in such a way that it stays open easily, too, even if you only open a page or two in. The Walker doesn't stay open as easily at the very beginning or end of the book. But this is why God invented book weights.

In the Interweave book the patterns are illustrated entirely with color photographs and the pieces are worked in smoothly textured yarns in various colors. Although a few of the yarns used are dark, care has been taken to make sure the stitches show up pretty well. To my (admittedly untrained) eye, I think a couple of the swatches could have been blocked a little more strenuously.

The patterns don't seem to be arranged in any logical fashion at all. Not even alphabetically. And there is no index. No table of contents. If you see a pattern you like, better put a sticky on that page or something because you'll have to leaf through the whole book to find it again.

There are some (very minor) illustrated instructions in the front of the book. A page each devoted to casting on, the knit stitch, the purl stitch. One page devoted to both increasing and decreasing (which says the easiest way to increase is to knit in the front and back of one stitch...now I'm not saying that's hard, but I bet a lot more unintentional increases are made by people inadvertently doing yarn overs). One page for binding off. One page about gauge. There are several pages of graph paper bound into the back.

Oh, and there are "tips" scattered through the book...for example "It's quite common to forget to make a yarnover when knitting. If you've forgotten to pass a slipped stitch, work it on the wrong side when you come to the decreased stitch." Excuse me, what?! You start off talking about a yarnover and then you're talking about a slipped stitch. I've been knitting for a while. I know how to pick up a missing yarn over in the wrong side row and I've even learned how to do it when I am on the next right side row....but this "tip" seems only confusing to me. You're telling me to do something...or perhaps even two somethings...but you're not giving me the slightest hint of how to do it. Or them.

Another one - "When slipping the first and last stitch of each row, be careful when you turn your work to avoid having a slipped loop down the side of your project." Again, what?! If you are slipping your selvage stitches, don't you want that row of slipped loops along the sides? And what does turning the work have to do with anything? Maybe this is some arcane piece of knitting knowledge I just don't have. Or are they just warning you not to let that last, slipped, stitch fall off your needle?

I sort of feel as though I'm shooting fish in a barrel, but here's one more - "After knitting a swatch, some knitters wash it to avoid any irreversible damage to your project that may occur in your washing machine." Okay, let's ignore the grammatical issues here....I know what they are trying to say...though they make it sound as though a horde of knitters will come bursting into your house, snatch your swatch out of your hands and throw it in your washing machine. Why couldn't they just saysomething like "If you wash and block your swatch, you will have a better idea of how the yarn will behave in your finished project." And washing machines? I don't think most of us are just tossing our hand knits in the washing machine.

So what do you get if you spend $7 more and order the Barbara Walker? Well, you only get black and white photos, which can be a little frustrating in the sections on two- and three-color pattern knitting. But you get an index. You get an eminently logical arrangement of stitch patterns, with interesting tidbits from Barbara telling you things like where the pattern came from and how one stitch leads to the development of a second. And a third. You don't get any "tips" but I think I've indicated how helpful they are. You don't get the graph paper or the rudimentary "instructions." But you get a book you might be tempted to read in bed. You get a sense of the person behind the collection, a fellow knitter, someone you could sit with over a cup of tea.

Am I going to take the Interweave books off my Amazon Wish List? No, because you can never have too many stitch dictionaries and they are pretty. But I'm going to be spending my money on the Walker books first. (And you know the frustrating thing? I owned these books before...I know I did. But I can't find them anywhere. I think they must have disappeared in a move or something.)

Now, about that yarn...

After reading about Beaverslide yarn all over the internet, I decided that it really behooved me to try some. So I trotted over to the website and, lo and behold, there was some on sale. So I got two skeins (about 480 yards) of very soft merino lambswool in Coral Bells and two skeins (about 420 yards) of McTaggart tweed in Rosehips. I just tried photographing them and I am definitely going to have to wait until sunlight to take their pictures. But they are nice. I could definitely imagine a sweater in these yarns.

Current Reading

Man, oh man, I just finished up George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, which had me spell-bound from pretty much the first page. Great fantasy...as in, this would be a great book even if set in our world. Lots of politics and inter-family bickering. Lots of nasty characters. Lots of swordplay. Fair smattering of sex, both nice and nasty. And, oh yeah, walking dead...and dragons...and I can't wait for the next one. I ordered the next two from Amazon today.

And until they arrive, I'm reading Cornelia Read's The Crazy School. I really liked her first book, Field of Darkness. I hope she doesn't have sophomore slump.