Ruthless Knitting Archive

I’ve been looking forward to reading No Sheep for You since I first learned from Amy Singer’s blog that she was in the midst of writing it. I preordered it from Amazon months in advance of the publication date and have waited patiently for it to ship while many, many other people found and bought their own copies all across North America. (Sometimes Amazon is the greatest, but this was not one of those times.)

So it is with some pleasure that I announce that I have received it, I have read it, and I think No Sheep for You is a great book.

No Sheep for You is a pattern book and guide to knitting with non-wool yarns, including cotton, linen, silk, hemp, and others. It ought to be particularly helpful to people with wool allergies or sensitivities, as well as to people who do not wish to knit with wool for ethnical reasons. I am not one of those people — in fact, I am quite a big fan of wool, and I rarely venture into knitting with other types of yarn. In part, this is because I am more at home in a wool sweater and jeans than in virtually anything else, but there is more to it than that. The fact is that I haven’t seen very many patterns knit in non-wool that I wanted to make for myself, though I’ve seen plenty of beautiful ones. Something about the whole category of summer sweaters and wraps — which is usually where cotton and linen and bamboo yarns pop up in the magazines — just doesn’t suit me. So why not make up my own patterns in non-wool yarns? Since I haven’t gained much familiarity with how they behave in the course of knitting other people’s patterns, and since I’ve made some mistakes with cotton yarn (too-heavy blanket; too-heavy baby sweater), I’ve been reluctant to explore the non-wool arena.

My interest in No Sheep for You grew out of my hope that it would give me the information I needed to do so. I also hoped that it would include patterns that I liked and could use as models for my own explorations. It has met and exceeded my expectations.

The more I look at the patterns, the more I find that I like. Not only are many of them a good fit with my aesthetic, but — more important — many of them are smart, and a close examination of their construction and the designers’ choices reveals a lot of information about working with particular types of fiber.

Take Intoxicating, the mosaic-knit silk sweater, for example:

I think this sweater is really cute. I’m not sure I would wear it, but I like the details that went into its construction — the different front and back panels, the echoing of the orange from the back panel on the neckline, the lace sleeves. Even more, though, I like what the pattern and accompanying text reveals about working with silk yarn: mosaic stitch patterns help to stabilize slippery silk and make it behave more predictably. I’ve never seen much point to doing mosaic in wool (sorry, fans of mosaic knitting!), but when I see it done in shiny, bright-colored silk, it opens up new possibilities to my imagination.

There are at least nine other patterns that I like enough that I would knit them, which is quite a few more than I find in most books. I won’t post pictures here; rather, I’ll encourage you to check out the book’s page on Amazon, at Interweave, and at Knit Picks. Those three sites all have plenty of inside peeks. I couldn’t find a photo of Morrigan, the cotton Aran, but if I had, I would have posted it here: this sweater, by Jenna Wilson, is to die for. And I’m not even a big fan of cables!

At first, I was a bit disappointed with the information section at the beginning of the book, in which Singer discusses how various classes of non-wool fibers are created, their properties, and how to go about familiarizing yourself with a non-wool yarn in order to be able to design with it intelligently. I am a rather ravenous collector of information, and I think what I wanted was an encyclopedia of tips about each fiber — “Such-and-such works best when knit on the bias” and that sort of thing. I enjoyed the chapter on swatching (titled “Learn to Love Your Geeky Thing”), but I’m already a committed swatcher, so it wasn’t the godsend I was looking for. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that the book tells me everything I need to know to start knitting and designing in non-wool fibers without getting bogged down in specific rules that would most likely be of little use. After all, new non-wool fibers are constantly being invented, blended with other fibers in new ways, and spun and plied creatively. What could one book tell me about them that would be more helpful than general guidelines about how to figure these fibers out myself?

I’m inspired by No Sheep for You to branch out a bit, to work more with hemp, linen, cotton, and their ilk and see where they take me. For some time, I’ve thought of creating a new version of a sweater I once had that my grandma knit for my mom: a cap-sleeved, short pullover in light blue cotton that I used to wear in the summer. I think I will take Singer’s advice, buy a single ball of each of several different yarns, and see what I can come up with.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.