When Bad Things Happen…Book Review

When bad things happen to good knitters:
This book is a complete survival guide for first-time knitters – and more experienced knitters – who need help in the middle of the night with project errors.

Call them knitting nanas, call them knitting fairy godmothers, authors Marion Edmonds and Ahza Moore are here to hold your hand and tell you everything is going to be all right. Whether your knitting pattern appears to have been written in Aramaic, you’ve dropped a stitch (or a whole bag full of stitches), you’ve forgotten to increase, you’ve been knitting in the wrong pattern sequence for 4 rows, or you can’t get your head through the neck hole of your newly knit sweater, Marion and Ahza will give you level-headed advice on what to fix, how to fix it, and when you can just fudge it. With 119 years of knitting experience between them, they’ve seen it all and fixed it all. For beginners and more experienced knitters alike (the more experienced you are, the more elaborate the mistake), When Bad Things Happen to Good Knitters should be in every knitter’s yarn bag.

About the Author
Between them, Marion Edmonds and Ahza Moore have 119 years of knitting experience. As partners in KnittingTogetherNYC, they have made knitting their livelihood, giving private knitting lessons and teaching at SoHo’s Purl yarn store. They contributed patterns to Last-Minute Knitted Gifts by Joelle Hoverson and develop patterns for magazines. This is their first book.

source: Amazon.com

I guess I must have had this pattern on my mind, because I had chosen this log cabin blanket recipe to write about, promptly forgot about it and a couple of weeks later started knitting a log cabin blanket using all my pink yarn.

It might stay pink if it makes it to baby blanket sized, or I might add in some pastel green and blue, too, to make a bigger blanket. We’ll see. I’m also holding several strands of yarn together to make a kind of bulky yarn, which means it’s deeply satisfying how much yarn is used even as the project is still relatively small.

In Kristen Finlay’s version, DK weight yarn scraps (or fingering/sock yarn held double) are used to make a simple scrappy log cabin blanket that’s lighter weight than my version. Log cabin is a great technique for knitters of any skill level because it’s worked in garter stitch. The only not completely basic technique you need for log cabin knitting is picking up stitches.

If you’ve never worked a log cabin knitting project before, this is a good introduction, and it is really nice to use all your yarn scraps in one big project you’ll use for years to come.

If you use a lot of DK weight yarn you can keep building on it whenever you finish a project, or if you use more worsted weight you can do the same thing with it, it will just be a little bigger starting out than the pattern calls for. How big it gets is totally up to you.

I have really been enjoying working on my log cabin project, and it’s my current sitting at my desk and need a break knit (do you have one of those or is it just me?).

Ready to start your own log cabin blanket knitting project? You can grab the free pattern from Kristen Finlay on Ravelry.

Need more log cabin inspiration? Check out more log cabin knitting patterns.

[Photo: Kristen Finlay]

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