knitting books

My summer knitting is sweater knitting. I would start a cardigan, discard the project for awhile, and return to it. There would be a hat or a scarf here and there but I eased myself into unhurried and meditative knitting.

Now that it's fall, my knitting is beginning to reflect the anxiety I feel about my life and adulthood. It's time for neurotic knitting of the gloves, scarves, and hats so that I can wear it right away and feel like a productive human being. Well, I am not really complaining. I do love the fall despite the anxieties. One of the permanent remnants of my schoolgirl days is that fall feels like a beginning with so many possibilities.

So I never find myself missing the summer (except for the beach). I am neurotic at heart and prefer the cold to the heat. As for knitting, I am definitely not a sweater knitter and glad to be done with that for now.

My favorites are gloves and mittens. Since I know very little about yarns, and cannot buy skeins of cashmere yarn, I like to just buy myself a craft store quality skein of wool and be able to finish a project with it. Gloves let me do that and they are pretty and complex without being too difficult.

I envision my life being filled with hundreds of knitted gloves... some funky, some practical. And since I now consider myself an intermediate knitter, I want a bit of a challenge too. And after a bit of fretting and searching, I found the perfect book:

Knitting New Mittens and Gloves: Warm and Adorn your Hand in 28 Innovative Ways

The patterns there seem fun, the pictures are gorgeous, and the finished products actually seem wearable. And and and.... the paper is shiny, the cover is pretty, the font nice, and the book smells really good.

I didn't know when I started to knit, that this craft would open up a whole new section of the bookstore to me. I guess I should have known when I went searching for a knitting instruction book and saw an overwhelming selection of pretty books. I honestly thought then that I would teach myself to knit from one book and then get all my patterns elsewhere. But how to resist knitting books esp when they are pretty art books for people who can't afford 100 dollar Matisse books?

So before I know it, I realized, in my last reconfiguration of the bookshelves, that I have a tiny but a growing selection of knitting book. So along with a virginia woolf section and an ethnography section, I have a knitting section. And for me, one way to define education is: opening up new sections in the bookstore, and creating more distinct sections in one's own library.