what a beautiful, enticing book!, October 1, 2004

I should start by saying I adore this book. The patterns are universally tasteful, unique, and gorgeous. Your friends and family would be thrilled if you made any item from this book. Another reviewer said color is Joelle's thing, and that is true. As far as color and design go, the book is truly inspiring.That said, I can see two areas for improvement that prevented me from giving a 5-star rating: First, the photography, while beautiful, is sometimes less than helpful for the knitter. Sometimes items are shot in such isolation that it's difficult to envision them on someone, sometimes there are no shots of the whole garment laid out so that you can see the final shape. Sometimes shots are not of the whole item at all, even if they are modeled.Second, there are quite a few mistakes in the patterns. Joelle has posted all the pattern corrections on the Purl website, though, so as long as you're aware of them it's no problem. You can find the corrections...

This is a beautifully presented book, it was a real treat to open it up with it's eau-de-nil facing pages and quality paper. It would be a beautiful gift itself!The book opens with the assumption that the reader already knows something about knitting but does cover such basic ground as gauge, equipment, and yarn types. It does this is in a concise but complete enough way. Then there is an extensive section on colour that manages to cover the basics in a non- condescending way and add some useful takeouts such as suggesting that we twine yarns together to see how they look rather than just hold the skeins adjacent....and colour really is Hoverson's thing - you can tell this even without being aware of her background as a fine arts student and stylist. The colours and photographs are stunning. Probably my favourite is some fluorescent, fuzzy, red bootees on a citrussy background - stunning combo.The patterns are grouped into sections based on how many...

Joelle Hoverson is the owner of Purl, a lovely yarn shop located in downtown NYC. In addition to being beautifully photographed, this book is really well organized (by the length of time each project is estimated to take) and well written. I buy lots of knitting books and while they often contain a lot of valuable techinical and instructional info, many of them tend to be disappointing when it comes to their patterns. However, that isn't the case here: most of these patterns are things I would LOVE to make.A lovely, unique book!