|  |
| Customer Reviews: |
|
Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
 The "best" from Interweave Knits Apr 13, 2008
Interweave Knits is the knitting magazine I eagerly await each season for, without fail, I find a "must-knit" in its pages. Over the years, many well-known designers have had patterns featured in this popular magazine, although many young designers have found a place here as well. Interweave Knits is known for its innovative and appealing designs, offering challenging and wearable garments for advanced and beginning knitters alike.
As Pam Allen, past editor-in-chief, explains in her introduction: "The best moments [in putting together the magazine], however, come when the contents of a submission envelope spill out and elicit a collective `Ahhh!' from the staff...For The Best of Interweave Knits: Our Favorite Designs from the First Ten Years, we've culled as many `Ahhh' projects from past issues as would fit into these pages."
Over the years, many Interweave Knits designs have become as well-known as their creators, and this collection of 30 designs contain many of these: the Lotus Blossom Tank (Sharon Shoji); the Forest Path Stole (Faina Letoutchaia); and the Icarus Shawl (Miriam Felton). This leads to the obvious question: How many of the patterns featured here are your favorites? This collection includes four of mine, two already listed (Icarus Shawl and Forest Path Stole) and two others-Striped Fringe (Amanda Blair Brown), an ingeniously designed wrap of seven different colored stripes, and Cambridge Jacket (Ann Budd), the perfect zip-up weekend sweater.
Sweaters in The Best of Interweave Knits range in finished chest sizes of 32.5" to 57.5", with the average range being 36" to 48". Scattered throughout the volume are "beyond the basics" sections that cover topics from cast-ons to blocking, pulling together great resources into one volume.
Armchair Interview says: Find new personal favorites.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Interweave maybe, best? never! It's an incredibly boring book. Feb 27, 2008
I have liked Interweave Knits since its beginnings. One of the reasons Interweave Knits is interesting to me is because every issue pushed the envelope on design and technique. It also had very lovely pieces.
Unfortunately, the pieces in this book, (except for Forest Path Stole) don't really bring to mind what made Interweave Knits the best mag on knitting. The pieces are nice, but they are some of the blandest designs that were published. You feel as though the people who sat down to pick the patterns wrote down a set of rules: "OK, gals, we need one from every issue, AND we need sweaters, and a shawl and a stole and a pair of socks." Instead of going at it from the angle of what really were the pieces that made Interweave Knits stand apart.
And frankly, it's as if the editors couldn't pick and just decided to agree to disagree on the most fantastic pieces and go with the consensus makers. And you end up with a beautifully edited and hugely promoted boring knitting book.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Worth the buy Feb 17, 2008
Really liked this....I haven't been knitting that long and didn't have these patterns from the magazine....I look forward to making some of them.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Timeless and beautiful from cover to cover Dec 04, 2007
One of the reviewers said "timeless classics" and that is THE best review this book can get. Not a single ugly pattern in this book - all of them are timeless, beautiful and perfect. The Forest Path Stole is so beautiful I'd like to wear it on my wedding day (happily enough, seems I still have time to learn how to make it - it's terribly complicated).
At first I was irritated by the "how to knit" sections between patterns, but when I read them it turned out they were detailed, far beyond basics and well worth reading and keeping at hand.
I am not a subscriber of Interweave Knits (much though I would love to) so I haven't seen the patterns before. I don't understand people complaining the book is just a repetition of the magazines - title says it, doesn't it?
To sum up: a beautiful books with beautiful patterns and great technical advice: what else could you want?
3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
handy to have the good patterns all together in one place Dec 03, 2007
I found that many of the patterns that were my faves are in here -- I'm not a big fan of the super-bright "woman-of-a-certain-age, I'm gonna look like a clown so that everyone can tell this is handmade" type stuff. I think it is nice to have patterns in a more durable format - I love my old copies, but they get more and more fragile with each handling. Kind of like a greatest-hits album; sometimes you just want to get to the good stuff without having to sort through the chaff. I would have liked to see a few kids' patterns in here, since alot of the knitting I do (or would like to find time to do) is for my children.
|
| |
|
