The Knitter's Bible [Paperback]

I was looking for the Holy Grail - a knitting book that covers *all* knitting techniques, preferably in detail. Montse Stanley's _Knitter's_Handbook_ comes close, but in my opionion, her tone is overbearing and it is unreadable.

This book by Claire Crompton is *not* the Holy Grail, nevertheless, it is a fairly comprehensive overview of major categories of techniques. The methods are not explored in detail (e.g. there is no pattern included to practise entrelac, for most of the techniques there is only one way shown to hold the yarn), but it does cover the big categories like colour knitting (fair isle, intarsia, mosaic), textured knitting (ribbing, twisted stitches/fake lace, lace, cables, embossed knitting like bobbles), felting, modular knitting (entrelac, mitred squares), etc. In short, this book is ideal for dabbling in a technique, then if you really like it, pursuing it in a more specialized book.

I would've given this book 3 solid stars, but the cute, quick patterns threw it over the top for 4 stars. Notable patterns that would make quick-to-knit wonderful gifts are: a cute stuffed sheep in the section on loop knitting, easy lace sachet bags, and little gift bags with simple intarsia or textured patterns.

Once I had learned the basics of knitting from one of those "Leisure Arts" pamphlets, I went to the book store and gathered up all the knitting books they had and looked through them. This is the one I chose to bring home and I've been very happy with it. Don't get this book for a fun read or attitude, get it to help your knitting skills. The instructional pictures are the best I've seen in any knitting book. The photographs in the stitch library are also good quality and inspiring. The back flap has a list of all the abbreviations in the book (the same ones you will see in patterns) and is one of the most useful parts of the book to me. When following a pattern I will look in the index for the part of the book that has illustrated instructions and refer to these to begin with. Then I only need the back flap instructions and then finally I can just remember what the abbreviation means. The only reason I didn't give the book 5 stars is because I didn't personally care for most of the projects. I did make the lace bags to practice lace knitting, but for the most part I wouldn't mind if the project section were left out all together. I don't see this as a big flaw, since tastes vary widely and it would be impossible for any designer to please everyone. Overall, if a beginning-intermediate level knitter was only going to have one instructional/reference book, this would be a great one to have.

This is a beautiful book, with many photos and clear looking page spreads. It's very nice in a lot of ways, but to call it a knitter's bible seems to be over-reaching badly. It's more like a survey course of knitting possibilities. I enjoyed seeing all you could do with knitting---lots of fancy techniques like extremely textured bobble type stitches, intricate fair isle, embroidery-style picture knitting, etc. But I think this book would be not at all useful as a reference. For example, it gives instructions that used slipped stitches several pages BEFORE it explains what exactly a slipped stitch is, and when it does, it's a casual sort of explanation, not a detailed one. There are lots of interesting stitch patterns, but only a page about knitting instruction shorthand like psso. There is a heavy emphasis on knitting that uses knitting into the back and front of stitches, but the instructions on how to do that were quite confusing and unclear to me, and the diagram type pictures of techniques like this were beyond me---why no nice clear pictures of those, like there were of far more unusual knitting ideas?

I don't mean to knock this book. I really liked looking at it, and I thought some of the projects looked like they would be a lot of fun, like a cushion cover with squares of different patterns. Even then, though, the pattern just sort of casually mentions you would need a backing fabric, and doesn't get into how you would sew this onto the front at all.

I think this book would be most useful if you were a pretty good basic knitter already, and wanted to get a lot of ideas of where to go next with your knitting---what the far reaches of knitting are, and how to do some far out and quite interesting new things with your skills. But I think of a "bible" of a craft as something that clearly explains all or most aspects of it that you would need to look up often, and this book doesn't do that at all.