CogKnition

Book Review: Knit One, Felt Too

March 18th, 2006 | View Comments

Cover of Knit One, Felt Too

Author: Kathleen Taylor
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Rating: 3.5 Skeins
Buy Knit One, Felt Too on Amazon.com

I bought this book when I couldn’t find Felted Knits in the bookstore and well, I prefer the other one. That’s not to say that this book is bad, because it’s not.

This book is written in a more colloquial style, and some people may find the felting instructions here to be more accessible. The books cover much of the same material on felting basics and troubleshooting; Knit One, Felt Too lacks a section on designing felted items.

I do think that having real photographs instead of illustrations would have been better (there is one photograph of a swatch before and after felting), but the text is clear enough that they aren’t absolutely necessary.

One thing that this book has that Felted Knits doesn’t have is a selection of bios on famous felters, variously inserted throughout the book.

My big beef with this book is not the projects themselves–most, if not all, of which seem to be worthwhile knits–but the way they’re presented in the book. Namely, the samples in the book are knitted in ugly colors. Would that Kathleen Taylor had the fine art training of Joelle Hoverson!

Take the front cover, for example. There is a hat knitted in red, purple, and olive green (not so bad), a bag knitted in magenta, lime green, and an electric blue-violet (bright, but also not so bad), a pair of striped slippers in purple, yellow, magenta, and neon orange (again, bright, but not all that offensive), and a teddy bear knitting in red, purple, blue, and green (YUCK).

Then all of that is laid out on a hot pink background, which makes the projects that didn’t look bad by themselves look horrendous.

An unfortunate number (but by no means all) of the projects in the book suffer from a clashing-colors problem. Which is sad, because if they had been knitted in nice colors, I might be inspired to make them, but I’m not.

By far the worst offender is the Touch-of-Fur Scarf on p. 84, which is shown in sky blue, bright orange, royal blue, bright green, and a variegated furry novelty yarn in pastel shades. I’m sorry, but furry novelty yarns should be used with care to begin with, and those colors just do not go together.

But the projects are not a total loss. The Wine Sack looks quite nice–too bad I’m not a wine drinker–as does the draft blocker, several of the slippers and pillows, and the mittens.

Overall, this is a decent book and I feel that it complements Felted Knits nicely, but if you have to choose, get the other one.

Buy Knit One, Felt Too on Amazon.com

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CogKnition posted this on March 18th, 2006 @ 12:18am in Book Reviews | Permalink to "Knit One, Felt Too"

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