I have to get to know a book before I can write about it. I have lounged with it. I have lunched and dined with it. I have slept next to it, and once slept under it. I have read it in the bath and in the kitchen. I have put it on a book stand, because I am the sort of person who has a book stand, and imagined myself to be a Renaissance prince squinting at the latest scholarly treatise to come out of Leipzig. I have spent so much time toting this hefty book around that I really wish it had come with four wheels and a string, so that I could pull it behind me like a toy horse.
Sequence Knitting hit the scene like a time bomb with a slow ticker. Nobody knew about it. The wild success of Sequence Knitting was all the more remarkable in that, according to the usual rules for Making a Knitting Book, it did everything wrong. There were a lot of words, many of them big words. There were a lot of mathy, mathy numbers.
There were no pictures of anyone in a sweater on a cliff in the Shetland Islands. In fact, most of the pictures were of swatches. Swatches in pale colors.
Knitters hate swatches. You might as well present them with a picture album called Moths I Have Known. But Campochiaro self-published her book, which meant she answered only to herself. The result was a dazzling, unclouded reflection of a steel-trap mind engaged in the creation of new hand-knit fabrics. The topic this time is marled knittingβcreating fabrics that are ultimately based on two or more strands of yarn held together and worked as one composite yarn.
I know what marled knitting is because the book begins with the definition. From one small questionβ What happens if I knit with more than one yarn? Nothing is rushed, nothing is overlooked. There are swatches, so many swatches, arranged in meaningful rows and columns. There are tables, so many tables. M aybe not. The first time in this book my heart skipped a beat.
