Designing: Japanese Knitting Stitch Bible

 

I purchased this book in April of 2018. I under enough deadlines when it arrived that I placed it on my bookshelf without much more than a glance. Just recently I’ve had the time and mental space to pull it out again and really look through it.

Now that I’ve had a chance to really look, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this book!! You know how the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes after he sees something he hadn’t even considered before? Well, I’m pretty sure my brain grew three sizes after looking through this book.

I spent hours pouring over this book after I opened it. I kept stopping my mathematically minded sons and husband as they walked past my desk to show them the charts and symbols. I tried explaining to them how the new way of visually representing the stitches with different notations and having no words at all on page after page felt so liberating and amazing. They were not properly impressed.

Many of the stitch patterns in the book are not completely new to me. I own at least 9 other stitch dictionaries and I pour over most of them every time I sit down to start building responses to submission calls. So I hold a lot of different stitch possibilities in my mind. But even the ones that feel somewhat familiar aren’t quite the same – the stitches are twisted to help them pop of the background better or the cables are smaller or the simply the “normal” way of representing the stitches is just different enough that it sparks my brain in a way that I haven’t felt for ages.

I’ve already got three designs on the needles and a line of others percolating in my mental queue inspired by ideas I saw in this book. Plus I can’t wait to try some of the things in there that caught my attention even if they’ll never end up as a design.

Also, turns out this is actually Hitomi Shida’s second stitch dictionary! Her first collection of 250 knitting stitches is being re-released later this year in English for the first time. So now I’m wondering, can I wait that long? Do I just want to try to pick up an older copy of the original in what they call “simplified Chinese”? Or do I need to study side by side? I haven’t decided yet. But I do know that I’ll be picking up one or both versions of it before the end of the year.

Designing: Some of my Favorite Knitting Books

I love my knitting books. I feel like I can never have enough. I like being able to look up a small tidbit in one book and a piece of a neckline in another and possible cable idea in the next book and read some insight in another book. Here I’ve listed some of my favorites and what I use them for.

I think I own almost all of Elizabeth Zimmermann’s books. Although I love really anything by her I do have two favorites. Knitting Without Tears for the straight forward technical help that offers throughout the book. Sometimes when I’ve got a design that just isn’t doing what I expected it to do, I’ll go back and read over different bits of this book to see if she can tell me why exactly. And Knitting Around where she shares pictures and stories of her life. I love those glimpses she shares.

Knitting from the Top by Barbara Walker is another book I find myself coming back to time and again as I think through a new design. I like to reread the sections before I set down to start a new pattern so I’m sure I don’t miss any of the important steps to consider in a top-down sweater design.

For design inspiration, I have a regular rotation of all three of Barbara Walker’s Treasuries (in my head I think of them as the blue one, the red one and the yellow one) and several of the Harmony Guides from the 1980s. I find I use three of them consistently with Volume 4 being my favorite by far. In fact, I’m going to need a new-to-me copy since every time I leaf through mine another few pages comes loose from the binding.

For a while this Spring most of my knitting books were stuck in a closet I couldn’t reach due to our ongoing construction (I talked about that here.) So I’ve been looking at new books. So I now I have four new books. I’ve only cracked open one of them so far.