Customer Reviews

Fishermen's Sweaters: 20 Exclusive Knitwear Designs for All Generations

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Alice Starmore is the authority when it comes to Aran knitting and this book demonstrates that. The pictures are gorgeous and the directions for the projects are well done. So, get inspired and make one of these! I have just started an Alice Starmore project and all I can say is that I am thoroughly enjoying it and find rather addicting. Her directions and charts are very clear and easy to follow. Her designs are truly works of art!

Alice Starmore is a knit designer who is reknown for her colorwork (Fairisle type--she hails from Lerwick, Scotland) and for her textured Aran and Guernsey-style work. Here she creates some glorious textured sweaters in chapters named after lands where fisherfolk live, work and yes, knit their characteristic designs. The chapters include:

1. Scotland
2. England
3. Ireland (including the Aran Isles)
4. Points North, South and East (including Breton, Norway and the Baltic lands and the Faroes)
5. The New World (hey, that's US!! Nova Scotia, Cape Cod, and more.)

The sweaters range from the thickly cabled true Aran style (the gorgeous Innishmore is incredibly deep and intricate) to colorwork such as a combination of textures and pattern characteristic of Estonian knitting. There is also an adorable child's sweater modeled after a Breton sailor's striped jersey.

This is one of Starmore's most useful books. The sweaters could be worn by men, children, fashionable women, hikers, you name it. If you love TEXTURE, you will adore this, but there is also color. In addition to the designs I just mentioned, I love the charming "Nova Scotia" featuring scallop shells in a knit-purl design.

This is one of my favorite Starmore books.

I am new to Aran kniting. The detailed, close up pictures of the sweaters show very clearly how the stitches should appear. The charts are easy to follow, and Starmore's general directions in the back of the book are a bonus. Sweaters are featured in light to heavy yarns. The fibers range from cotton, silk, wool or a combination. My sample knitted swatches have been sucessful.

I like the patterns, seems to be well explained. I won't make anything from it before at least a month though. Will know more at that time.

I can't praise this wonderful book enough. Every adult sweater in this collection is a treasure!

Starmore's marvelous book focuses on single-color, richly textured sweaters (though there are also two very striking Scandinavian-style pullovers which would serve as an excellent introduction to multicolor knitting.) There are complex Aran-style cabled sweaters as well as knit-and-purl brocades which involve little or no cabling. These brocade patterns (Lochinver, Filey, Norfolk, and Cape Cod, to name my own favorites) are some of the loveliest and most elegant sweaters ever to emerge from Starmore's workshop--and best of all, they are much simpler to knit than they appear!

Traditional construction is the hallmark of this collection. It is Starmore's ode to the Scottish fisher gansey, the art form of her homeland. Therefore, most of the designs call for DK, sport, or 5-ply gansey yarn, and fairly small needles. Finishing one of these fine-gauge sweaters will require a little extra patience and stamina, but the end result will be a hard-wearing, versatile, impeccably crafted garment.

It's a toss-up as to which is Starmore's best work: this book or the magnificent "Aran Knitting". This book has more original designs, however, and much greater variety among them.

This is a book that just makes you itch to knit. I had not knit a sweater in the round until I started working with this book, and I unerstand now why traditional knitters would never have done things any other way.

I have rarely seen such beautiful swater patterns or such beacutiful photographs. If you like to knit, be patient and learn from this book and you will be immensely rewarded.

...All right, I admit it, I don't know a damned thing about knitting sweaters...but I was shelving on the holiday-season overnight crew at the bookstore where I work last night, when the fishermen's-sweater clad models on the cover took possession of me - - all right, it was around 4:30 am, and at that hour I'm suggestible enough to begin with (I had just minutes before felt a quick rush of adrenalin after mistaking the siren-and-tire- screech on a comedy disc playing over my store's speakers for an actual live squad car en route to investigating those of us locked inside) - but those sea-kissed models, and the earthy, rough-hewn beauty of their sweater-skirt-and- boots ensembles, each posed amid a stunning traditional coastal tableau - each one had me ready to light the fire, put on my favorite disc by Kate Rusby, Steeleye Span or the Poozies, and curl up with a Thomas Hardy novel. Attention, sweater-knitters of the world: after you've adopted this wonderful book into your seasonal roster for practical use, do the rest of the household a favor - leave this one on the coffee table. And don't ask why, when soon after, all the men in the house start smoking meerschaum pipes and spending inordinate amounts of time doing scrimshaw, all the while reeking of salt. Aye - y'eve been warned!