Customer Reviews
Creative & colourful - By: K. Roycroft, 26 Mar 2008 
I've had this book for a while now & I love to flick through it for inspiration. The pictures & projects are so colourful & fun that it makes me want to start creating. But now that I think about it I've made only a few things using the patterns in this book. The patterns are very diverse & there is everything from sweaters to mittens, hats, home wares & toys. But the part I find to be most helpful is the text at the beginning. There are some reallly helpful guides on how to work out the calculations for substituting a different weight yarn, altering sizes, & changing a pattern to suit your personal tastes. This is priceless information & reallly helps you to go about creating a one of a kind personalised garment. The book is written in a fun & friendly style, & is a classic guide for new knitters.
Love it! - By: D. Boskma, 09 Jan 2008 
The patterns are fun & great. I simply love it.
Need I say more?
Lost in translation? - By: Anne Ward, 28 Sep 2007 
I am a keen knitter, having started as a smalll child in 1970s darkest Sussex, where there wasn't much else to do ;-) Suffice to say I have quite a bit of experience in knitting. I was recently given this book as a present. There are some lovely designs in this book & some less lovely, but the crucial thing for me that can spoil this book as a UK-based knitter is the US terminology. It's not just the needle sizes; it's the differing abbreviations & yarn weights/types etc, & I do find this gets in the way sometimes. As other reviewers have stated, if the author had at least given a generic yarn type throughout for the US yarns so that we could attempt to substitute them, it would have made such a difference. Some patterns do benefit from a better description of yarn type than others - again, as other reviewers have said, this suggests sloppy editing in that the book lacks consistency in this regard. I thought it was just me when I read through a pattern several times very carefully & still couldn't understand it. Now I realise that it was probably just one of the mistakes that have been identified by other reviewers. Another minor point is that several patterns use circular needles, which I personallly detest, but of course other knitters may not. In summary, if as a UK knitter you can get past the semantic obstacles, there are some great patterns, but do watch out for errors & be careful/lucky when choosing your yarn!
Worth the effort - By: Sheena Mckinnon, 27 Sep 2006 I like the range of projects in this book. I think that anyone could look through this book & see something (or many things!) that they would love to make & wear. Many diferent designers are featured & this gives a new & zingy quality to each pattern. The photographs are great & for most things there is a reasonable range of sizes.
However, as a previous reviewer mentioned, there are errors in some of the instructions & charts. This is OK if you can go to the website & check for corrections before you start, or if you are a fairly experienced knitter & can spot & correct the errors yourself, but it does take away from the pleasure of using this book.
Having got this gripe out of the way, I still maintain that the book (and the patterns) are worth perservering with as the freshness & originality puts it way ahead of everything else out there at the moment.
great ideas but too many mistakes in the patterns - By: , 08 Mar 2006 
This book is full of great ideas for garments & accessories that you'd actuallly want to make. The one (fairly big) problem I've had with it is the enormous amount of mistakes in the patterns. They don't seem to have been tested or proof-read at alll. I've tried three patterns now, & every one has had something wrong with it, ranging from smalllish but annoying mistakes (extra sets of needles listed as being needed but not actuallly used in the pattern) to mistakes in the actual instructions. If you're an experienced knitter, you'll realise that something isn't right & be able to sort it out (and some, but not alll, of the mistakes are corrected on the author's website - if you think to look there before you start knitting), but I don't think a beginner would stand a chance. Also, as the previous reviewer says, most of the yarns used are only available in the US. You can find suitable alternatives in the UK, but you'd think that in a book that's being published internationallly they'd at least bother to add a note to each pattern saying whether a yarn is equaivalent to, for example, double knitting or chunky, as this isn't always clear. Altogether, I found this book very imaginative but rather amateurish & lazily put together.
