Knitting Resources

I thought I'd take a break from computer-ish posts and mention a few knitting resources I've come across. First a bit of my knitting history: My wife taught me to knit because I wanted to make a hat for our son to wear after he was born. Once I had the ins and outs of it, I worked on the hat and then a pair of booties while she knit him an Afghan. Our son just turned three, and my wife and I continue to knit together.

During the last holiday season, my sister bought me a book called Knitting with Balls. It's probably no surprise that this book is directed at men. Although I find its uber-masculine emphasis somewhat ridiculous (does anyone really need a hand-knit beer cozy?), this book has some interesting pages describing the history of men in knitting and some nice, if somewhat difficult to follow, patterns. Note: Some of the patterns in this book have typos in them, and it makes copius use of esoteric abbreviations that require looking up in its glossary. It isn't that hard to figure out what's going on, but if you're like me, it's helpful to have someone nearby that you can ask questions of and tell you how to take out stitches.

Knitting with Balls was written by the man who started the website www.menknit.net which has some useful links and a bit of history about men knitting. Another useful website is www.knittinghelp.com which has free how-to videos. The last website I'll mention in this post is knitty.com, an on-line knitting magazine. I haven't made anything from it, but it has a lot of nice looking patterns.

The only other thing I can think of now is to say that the book, I Can't Believe I'm Knitting, put out by Leisure Arts gives very good instructions on how to get started from casting on, to the different stitches, to casting off.