One of the many nice things
about staying at Gayle's house is the bedtime reading.
After sitting up in Gayle's studio talking shop (knitting shop, that is) and drinking David's good wine, I toddled off to bed toting a whole stack of Japanese stitch dictionaries. And if there's anything I love for bedtime reading, right up there with Jane Austin, it's a good stitch dictionary. OK, call me a geek. I love looking at stitch patterns, analyzing how they work, thinking about how they might be used. And these books have some very cool stuff. The white book in particular had some lovely lace patterns.
Gayle's knitting library is, to put it mildly, extensive. From it all, these were among the "things I'd be least likely to run across on my own", and they are a treasure trove. I may just have to order one or two for myself. Everything is charted, and most of the symbols are familiar, plus the books have such clear illustrations of how to work the stitch associated with each symbol that I could figure out many of them even without knowing Japanese.
Gayle teaches classes on working with Japanese knitting patterns, (she'll be at Knitters Connection in Ohio in June, and also at Stitches Midwest this fall), and she sent me home with her very thorough class handouts that also explain a lot of the symbols.
I see some major swatching coming up.
3 comments:
Ohhhh! I so don't know how you can look at those after drinking. i don't drink a lot, so it doesn't take much for fog to set in!
You can come to my house....I have the same ones.
I would LOVE to browse through all those stitch dictionaries. I could lose many hours that way. 99% of my knitting books are stitch dictionaries. This does not mean I have an extensive knitting library though, LOL, cuz I definitely have less than a dozen knitting books.
What fun!
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