The most recommended knitting books

For years, I used to search for books about magic or the supernatural or alternate universes intersecting with the real world. Publishers mostly shunned them except for children’s books.

Today, there’s such a flood of paranormal cozy mysteries that it’s a challenge picking out ones that really work, that maintain believability while entertaining. Nancy Warren’s Vampire Knitting Club (first in a series) is the kind of fun, imaginative story I was looking for, combining a mystery with zany characters and an unusual premise. Vampires that knit? Cats that communicate?

This book lifted me out of the troubled ordinary world into a realm I’d love to visit again and again. 

This is a delightfully wacky book with endearing characters. Zinnia is having a bad hair day, literally. A hive of bees takes up residence in the wild and curly mane of her hair to add to her troubles—a missing brother and a mother who doesn’t seem to care. I fell in love with this book on the first page when I learned that Zinnia was about to yarn bomb a statue of her school mascot. (I’m a knitter and have fancied taking up yarn bombing myself.) Quickly-paced chapters alternate between Zinnia as narrator and the bees discussing their own perilous situation. Told with both humor and empathy, this is a book where you can’t turn the pages fast enough in order to find out how things resolve.

Amy has a way of making every poem feel personal, not just in the way the reader connects with the words, but in the way the subjects are presented. The poems are intimate, friendly, surprising, and comforting, whether they are written from a third-person perspective or from the point of view of the animals themselves. Beautiful to read, and beautiful to look at, readers will never look at the forest the same way again.

I am a very poor knitter and admire those who can knit up a jumper that is not embarrassing to wear. Esther Rutter is an expert and enthusiastic knitter and, in this book, she travels through Britain setting up her own challenges to knit something that echoes the traditions of the places she visits. There is a jumper from Fife in Scotland and a crocheted bikini its borders, Viking socks, and a Welsh cap: each one requiring hours of toil, each one accompanied by frustration and setbacks as stitches are dropped, the yarn snags and patterns are misread. As she journeys and knits, Rutter reveals the history of knitting, wool, and patterns place by place. I loved her perseverance, I relished her discoveries and I learnt enough about the knitter’s craft through time and today to make me want to get out my own knitting needs. 

A recurring theme in my life is the feeling of not fitting in. I loved this author's take on that theme. Sybil gets left at the altar by her fiance, who takes off with her twin sister. To escape her woes, she visits a friend in a faraway village where she's embraced by the locals. I love to knit, so the knitting angle also attracted me. Sybil is asked to make some knit goods for a display window and ends up organizing a knit-off to help save the shop. I loved the eccentric characters and the Hallmark feel of the story.

Everyone expects Fishel “Fish” Rosner to do “boy” things, which doesn’t include his favourite activities of knitting and dancing. I loved watching Fish learn to stand up for himself, and even more, I love how this story invites readers to imagine a world where everyone has the confidence to be themselves, no matter what anyone else thinks. This book kept me grinning long after I finished reading.

Extra Yarn is one of my very favourite books. It is the story about what you might do if you found a little bit of extra yarn. This yarn (in both senses of the word!) is inclusive, unexpected, as well as completely fantastic. 

The text of the story is subtle and leaves a lot of the story to be told through the illustrations and I am a huge fan of Jon Klassen’s illustrations. In this book, his beautiful, colourful wool really works to offset the darkness of the cold winter landscape.

This is simply a visually delightful and clever story with lots for kids and adults to enjoy.

This is a brilliantly researched book which allowed me to accompany Sofi Thanhauser as she travelled across continents to unearth the origin and the fate of fabric production.  It made me realise the terrible damage done to our environment and to communities through colonialisation, exploitation, industrialisation, and our throw-away economy. Tracking how craft is being replaced with slave labour, how traditions are being eroded, and local economies destroyed in the pursuit of cheaper and greater textile production, Worn is not a comfortable read, but it is, for me, a reminder of the human cost involved in most of what I wear. 

Those of us who knit know that it’s good for us, helping to keep us calm, moderate our heart rate, and more. Rachael explores the therapeutic nature of making in her own idiosyncratic way.

I love Rachael’s voice when she writes, enabling her to be profound while deeply down to earth. This is the only book by her that I haven’t edited myself, so was compelled to read it anyway. 

I used to play lots of string games as a kid. I realized as my kids were growing up, that kids don’t know these games anymore and I wanted to find something that would teach them at least a few that I remembered from my childhood.

I loved this book because it shows, with simple diagrams, some of the basic string games like Cat’s Cradle and it also includes string to get started with.

Not only that, there is a little history of string games for those who might want to know how they all started.