The Principle of Knitting by June Hemmons Hiatt

It’s been a long time since I came across a definite MUST HAVE reference book. Dudes, this is totally it! If you have a question about knitting, it’s in here.

I’m sure you’ve heard about this book. The entire name is The Comprehensive and Timeless Guide. The Principles of Knitting. Methods and Techniques of Hand Knitting, and it’s every bit of that. Just shy of 800 pages of every bit of knitting info, every technique, every little thing you can imagine.

You can find the original, on sale, or now the electronic version HERE:

This book has been completely revised and updated, and just released – Feb 2012.

Check out this link HERE to get an inside view of this book. Check out the table of contents. There’s everything; every single thing you could ever think of to help with your knitting. New and better ways to do things, from casting on to seaming up and blocking. Everything!

Read about placement of hands and fingers for different methods of knitting. Read about how the techniques and stitches got their names. I could go on and on listing the different ideas and contents of this book, but you’d get a much better idea by clicking over to the BROWSE ONLINE version. Go on, check it out, I’ll wait right here….

There’s a lot to like about the Eloise Bandana from Katryn Seeburger. This cute little colorwork triangle can be worked as a bandana or kerchief size or a bigger shawlette.

It’s worked in two colors of fingering weight yarn so you can use whatever yarn you have in your stash and just make it as big as you can (since it is worked from the bottom up).

You can see the two sizes from the photo, and also two colorwork options: strawberries and lily of the valley.

But that’s not all the choices you have. In fact, there are 34 different charts you can choose from to knit onto your project. Some of the options include happy faces, a lobster, a pumpkin, a snail and a butterfly. There are cherries, peaches, tomatoes and radishes.

There’s even a blank square you can use to draw your own little design if you want to use something else. Or keep it blank and make it a plain checkerboard design.

And while both of these shawls use the same icons throughout, you could also use different designs throughout if you want. Say a fall version with a bat, pumpkin, leaf and acorn, or a summer beach theme with sailboat, fish, lobster and a bird? I keep suggesting four different icons because the larger size has four rows of squares, but the smaller has three, so you could do stripes of the same icon or alternate a couple of different ones, whatever you like.

Look through the finished projects on the Ravelry project page to see lots of different options, from rows to individual icons. There are also some projects that are smaller than the suggested size to make a smaller bandana. You could also keep going a make a bigger shawl working increases in the same way as you have been going.

Check out all the details and grab a copy of the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Katryn Seeburger]

Have you read?