Customer Reviews

1000 Great Knitting Motifs

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There plenty of yarns and patterns for knitters, but 1000 Great Knitting Motifs by Luise Roberts is the one pattern guide guaranteed to please all levels and styles of knitter. It features 1000 charted motifs to chose from - and not just Western, either: motifs from the Middle East and other parts of the world deftly separate 1000 Great Knitting Motifs from its largely-Western competitors. Add a number of categories which deftly lend themselves to both browsing and quick reference and you have a comprehensive needlecraft library reference including color charts to encourage knowledgable design variations and you have a real reference winner - complete with lay-flat binding for practical access while knitting.

Overall, I'd say this is a fairly decent pattern book. I bought it to use for designing market bags for the women in my family. I plan on using the argyle pattern (which is excellent), but out of 1,000 motifs, that's the only one I'll be using.

This book essentially works on the principle of quantity over quality. I'd say about half of the patterns are actually not very good at all, and pretty much all of the rest I'm not interested in due to personal preference. But there are just so many offered that you still have a decent chance of finding what you're looking for.

My biggest complaint is that the patterns are not modern enough. I liked the argyle because that is an older pattern that came back into vogue a couple of years ago, making it the most current pattern in the book. Since most of the women that I am knitting for have a very modern put-together look that I didn't find in this book, I will still be making my own stripe and color block patterns for most of the bags. Most of the 'modern' patterns in the book are geared toward children (alphabet, toys, flowers, insects, animals, etc).

The only reason that I consider this book pretty good is that fair isle is one of the most enduring pattern styles that I know of. If you're a fan of traditional fair isle patterns, then this is probably a good book for you. I'm sure that there are lots of fair isle fans that could get great use out of this book. There are also ethnic patterns sorted by area of origin, but the fair isle section is by far the largest.

The binding really is awful. The cover pictured is actually a cardboard binder that the book is not really attached to. It has little holes in the inside that the spiral binding of the book is supposed to slip into, but good luck using the book with it attached to the cover. It wasn't even attached when I received it in the mail and I've since made peace with the cover remaining unattached. That the spiral binding won't even keep the pages together when I flip through the book is a much bigger problem. The publisher might as well have just sent the pages in the mail with no binding at all for as well as the binding they used actually works.

This is a nice size book but disappointingly, comprised almost entirely of graphs. There ought to have been more (than the five photos) included along side some of the graphs to let you know how the motifs may come out. There is some explanations and ideas provided but that is on the light side too. If you still think you might like to get this book, I'd recommend taking a look at it first.

I find this book inspiring, because I love color and fair isle patterns. One cool thing about this book is that it takes an idea or a motif and then shows it in several different color combinations to show you how that would alter the look. This is in addition to the 1000 different motifs. (If you count all the different color combinations as individual options, there are 500 just from page 18-55, and the patterns continue all the way up to page 277.)

A note for fair isle purists: roughly half the patterns call for more than 2 colors per row.

Microsoft Excel works much better than photocopying for patterns like this. I select all the cells and set them to the size of a little rectangle that approximates my gauge of sts/rows per inch. Then I color them with the colors of yarn I will be using (ctrl + click to select more than one cell at a time). It works great for a visual representation of what your finished project will look like. I have 40 skeins of beautiful fine wool in 4 colors, sitting in a box, waiting for me to decide what to do with them, and this book has given me the inspiration to do that.

No frills, just patterns, shown in colorful graphs.

At first glance, you may wish there were pictures of the patterns as they would look when knitted. But after looking at the book for a minute, your imagination kicks in, and you are able to envision the patterns as they would look in finished form. Then you may, like me, appreciate the fact that there's no wasted space showing pictures of the knitting! Just 260 pages chock-full of graph-instructions, with 1-12 graphs per page!

They're great fun, and very inspirational for the imaginative knitter.

I've read the other reviews of this book to date and agree with them all. I do wish there were more pictures, if only to give me ideas. I also can see the benefits of not having photographs: the lack of photos does not limit the knitter's creativity and also keeps the book compact and manageable. However, because of this, I would only recommend this book for intermediate to advanced knitters. I consider myself an intermediate knitter and am hesitant as to how to combine the patterns into a sweater. I am having a difficult time visualizing how a sweater would turn out. The author does suggest, however, to photocopy the graphs and put them together in different ways before knitting several practice patches to experiment with color and placement. When I was a beginning knitter, I would have found this book overwhelming. An advanced knitter, I believe, would know just what to do with this book. I do wish that the book included more modern or pictoral patterns than it does.

I am relatively new to knitting, and I have been searching for a couple years for a book that would just have patterns in it ..... and I've finally found it!

This is the best knitting "idea" book I have come across!! The book is divided into designs based on region, and there are so very many wonderful ideas!! I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for some fresh new patterns.

The fact that the book is spiral-bound is super, too. It will lay open so you can follow it while knitting. The only bad thing about the whole book is that the spiral rings actually come out of the binding when you try to close it, so you have to insert the rings back into the holes before you close it. At least that's what happens with mine!! But it's definitely worth the effort!

Overall, hands down, the BEST knitting companion I've ever found!!

This book is just what it claims to be in its title, '1000 Great Knitting Motifs'. I love looking through it, have used it several times and refer to it often when I am looking for inspiration.

The book is divided into sections:

Section 1: 'Traditional Knitting Motifs' contains motifs from all around the world including Fair Isle, Lapland, Scandinavia, Western and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia and South America.

Section 2: 'Traditional Pictorial Motifs' contains pictorial knitting charts representing Native America, Homestead America, Aztec and Inca, Celts, Middle East and Arab, Africa, India and Tibet.

Section 3) 'Modern Pictorial Motifs' includes Alphabet, Zodiac, The World Around Us, Animals, Birds and Insects, Floral, Toys and the Nursery.

The book ends with a section on techniques for color knitting.

I recommend this book very highly. It will be a wonderful addition to any knitter's library.

I guess I was a little disappointed in this book. I had expected it to be designed and arranged along the lines of The Knitting Stitch Bible. I was wrong. It is mostly a book of graphs and charts that provide only a very sketchy notion of what the knitted fabric is like. Because of this, however, the book does allow one to create interesting motifs in more than one genre. I used one of the designs for a plastic canvas needlepoint project. One does have to use the patterns with care, however, as the stitches in knitting are "stitches" whereas the stitches in needlepoint are "across the bars." In short, you can come out wrong if you don't pay attention to counting bars rather than openings. One might also use the graphs to design beaded works. The caveat on this use of the book is that the number of rows and stitches in most of the designs may produced a much larger product than you desire. Ultimately I guess, if looking for a stitch directory, I'd look at other books; there are a lot of them out there.

I doubt if I will knit from this book, but for loomwork especially this is terrific with so many interesting patterns.