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33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
First aid kit for knitters, February 15, 2007
This review is from: When Bad Things Happen to Good Knitters: An Emergency Survival Guide (Paperback)
Along with the watershed "Knitting without Tears" (Elizabeth Zimmermann), Marion Edmonds' book "When Bad Things Happen to Good Knitters" may well become one of those "on every knitter's shelf" books.
The title is amusing, and the text is no less humorous; little vignettes about goofy things knitters do to fix up little and not-so-little boo-boos in their knitting.
Some help is given for how to rescue a dropped stitch. This is one of the beginning knitter's biggest faux-pas. You drop a stitch off the needle and rather than gather it up, you let it ride. Then you see either a stunningly ugly ladder down the face of your knitting or you end up with far fewer stitches on the needle than the instructions promise you should have. There is also help for the age-old problem "it's too long--how do I CUT knitting without it raveling or being ruined."
Having knitted since high school, I've made probably every one of these messes and faced the emergency alone and afraid (well, at least alone.) If you are a knitter who is perplexed by problems (split stitches, mistakes in lace, uncabled cables, too long, too short, dropped stitches) then you should pick up a copy of this. It's small enough (little square book) to fit in most knitting bags or even your purse. And it's amusing enough to be read for fun, while you pick up tips for problems down the road.
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not really "an emergency survival guide", January 3, 2009
This review is from: When Bad Things Happen to Good Knitters: An Emergency Survival Guide (Paperback)
This is a humorous and entertaining book about knitting and it is jam-packed with good information, advice, and knitting trivia. I can see a knitter taking this on a plane trip to read during a long flight. It is pleasant chit-chat and has the feel of a long conversation with a very nice friend with whom you share an interest or a passion.
Nested therein (in no particular order) are many valuable insights and tips and common sense advice gained through years of knitting experience. I suggest you highlight any bit of wisdom you want to remember, otherwise you will never find it again. The authors just jot down everything that occurs to them in what ever order it pops into their heads. Your heads may not work the same way.
What it is NOT is "an emergency survival guide." When "bad things happen" the last thing you want is paragraph after paragraph of badly indexed wit. The authors have not ever heard the phrase "cut to the chase." You do, eventually, find the part that tells you how to pick up a dropped stitch or whatever other emergency you've managed to get yourself into but, in the process, your level of stress has risen rather than diminished.
For my particular (low) level of expertise, I didn't find the text as clear and illuminating as I would have needed. The illustrations, too, are rather unhelpful. They are drawn black-and-white closeups of loops and needles but no sequence is presented. Most are a single closeup of the here-and-now that give you no sense of what happens next or what went wrong.
If the book was called "Helpful Hints from One Knitter to Another" I would have given it 5 stars and an exclamation point. The fact that the title implies that it's a 911 for inexperienced knitters and then turns out not to be particularly helpful for that subgroup of knitters is the reason I took off two stars.
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Knitting 911!, February 6, 2007
This review is from: When Bad Things Happen to Good Knitters: An Emergency Survival Guide (Paperback)
I am one of those failed knitters who has a bunch of half-finished projects in the closet. I seem to get tangled up in some problem every time, and I don't know how to extricate myself so I just ... quit. This cute little book was made for me. It gives help with everything from dropped stitches to patterns written in what appears to be early Aramaic, and it's actually FUNNY, too.
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