Unexpected Knitting

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but impractical.
Review: Buy this book if you are a jaded knitter and need the inspiration to take your craft to strange places where few knitters have gone before. Think Jan Messant - she of the atfully knitted vegetables (interesting, but who needs them) - only ten times so.

For the rest of us, this one is interesting but impractical. You would never make any of the designs but it's still interesting to look and ponder at them. Think of it as a book on knitting theory, or a book of upscale gourmet recipes with beautiful pictures, rather than the recipe book that you love and use everyday.

Rating:
Summary: this is high art
Review: Debbie New takes knitting forever out of the realm of craft and into that of high art. This is NOT your Grandma's knitting! With fiber and needles she conjures up artworks on scales ranging from statuesque to small. There are pieces both functional and beautiful, and while the book might be intimidating to beginner or intermediate knitters, it will be a source of inspiration and a delightful addition to the coffee table.

I made a 'scribble lace' capelet based on one of the techniques and it never fails to turn heads. While I am just an advanced beginner, I certainly aspire to one day be able to create magic with fiber like Debbie.

Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Take Knitting to a New Level!!!
Review: Debbie New's artistic abilities are incredible! While so many knitting books are "recipe" books with prescribed patterns, Debbie New's book invites creativity with new techniques and ideas. This book would be a wonderful addition to any knitter's library. For the experienced knitter, it offers new ideas and perspectives! For the new knitter, it encourages creativity and thinking outside of the box!

This book has added depth, dimension and freedom for artistic expression to my love of knitting! I don't need another book with traditional patterns. Debbie New embraces the art of knitting. Her artistic expression is to be applauded and appreciated!

Debbie New invites us to embrace the art of knitting! As a knitter of over 30 years, nothing could be more exciting! Thank you, Debbie!

Rating:
Summary: Delightfully Desirable Unexpected Knitting
Review: Not having met the author of this stunning, technically audacious knitting book, I imagine Debbie New as a renegade topologist, an explorer in the branch of math that unravels the almost mystical vagaries of knots and labyrinths. Like a traveler who delights in the adventure of the unknown, the author advises her readers, "Just remember that if you are wrong, so much the better, as it will both teach you something and lead you somewhere new."

And this is only on page twenty-nine.

I first encountered Debbie New in the nether pages of A Gathering of Lace, a coffee-table collection of knitted designs, where her knit coracle stood out among the shawls, gloves, and vests. Lest you not know what a coracle is, it is not something one either knits or wears. It is one of the most ancient and unpredictable forms of watercraft, traditionally fashioned from hides stretched over a small, round, wooden frame. A coracle appears in the classic adventure novel, Treasure Island, where its unsteerable nature nearly causes the young hero to perish. Instead, the goatskin bowl and its lonely passenger surrender to the chaos of the waves and end up in exactly the right place at the right moment.

The young hero of Treasure Island mercifully falls asleep while being tossed about on the waves, but not Debbie. I suspect there is nothing she loves better than dashing with wild abandon, wide awake, into the bubbling sea of creative possibility. Debbie knit her boat, undaunted by the fact that knitting is made of holes, and in fact she chose the holiest form of knitting, lace. She ignored her mathematician son's attempt to guide her with his treatise on "Coracular Applications of the Knitting of Hyberbolic Discs" in favor of following her own freeform, coracular-like intuitive movements.

No, the gleeful mind that fills this book's oversize pages could have been no more likely to stop to take direction from a treatise than a coracle would be likely to sail obediently from point A to point B. Now mind you, Debbie could not have been afraid of math. This woman is a scientist as well as artist, fluent in multiple specialties in both fields. In the field of science, she worked professionally as a microbiologist and a biomedical engineering inventor; and in the field of art, as a symphony violinist, potter, and as is obvious in this book, a visual artist and knitter. And if this is not enough, the frontispiece, a page from her notebook, makes one immediately think of Leonardo da Vinci, another scientist-artist.

Throughout the pages of this well-named book, Debbie seizes the unlikeliest elements of various textile disciplines (note the humor of the word discipline, implying orderliness, logic, sequence, predictability . . .) and flings them together until the bright darting glimmer of connections between elements catches her eye. In one of these alchemical moments, she slides yarn off the knitting needles as if it has not leaned on them for centuries, and instead pulls loops through loops with a little embroidery needle, using cheesecloth to keep the whole thing from unraveling. Then she pulls out the cheesecloth as well and lo and behold: we see a garment, "The Spider's Vest," that is knit, yes, but could not have been knit on knitting needles. And need I say that it is also beautiful?

In what I suspect must have been an extended frenzy of creativity, Debbie invented Ouroboros knitting, which marries mythology, topology, knitting, geometry, color theory, Houdini, and dare I say, a bit of schizophrenia or at the bare minimum, multiple personalities, which would account for the apparent multiple brains that are networked in Debbie's head. The results, which are modeled by handsome and insouciant New family members of all ages, from infant to elder, are reminiscent of Welsh tapestries, ancient Persian garments, and neon traffic patterns revealed by long-exposure photography, not all in the same garment, thank goodness. I tried standing on my head to figure out the pathway for her "Some Assembly Required" sweater, but my single feeble brain gave up. Even looking at her clear, calm schematics makes me dizzy. When I get my wits about me, though, I believe I could actually follow her careful, considerate directions, apply her hybrid techniques, and generate similar surprises.

There is water in this book. One of the glossy nine by twelve inch pages is filled with the image of a young man carrying the luminous, fiber-glassed lace coracle into a satin-surfaced sea. On the adjacent page he kneels in the delicate yet strong doily of a boat, surrounded by undulating rings of water, sculling peacefully. Perhaps beneath the coracle, beyond the eye of the camera, there swims a seal, a creature truly free to move in any direction at any moment. An artist, like a seal, can dive and sway and follow and sink and rise and do anything. It is this everywhichwayness that is the true and common origin of art and science, of the joy and silence that follows life as it unfurls. For out of the formless comes form, and it naturally arises in a beautifully choreographed forward-momentum, ever-expanding pattern. Both artist and scientist know this, and delight in following it as both witness and creative navigator.

Art and science do not collide, as some might think; they arise from the same fluid, omni-mobile source, and any collision is an illusion. Only at the superficial level, where it is possible to perceive two seemingly disparate fields, can a collision be imagined.

Like the wave-tossed hero of Treasure Island who nevertheless ends up in exactly the right place at the right time, Debbie, the seal-scientist-artist-author, again and again dives into the sacred space of a seemingly random sea of textile tools, techniques, fibers, and forms to playfully explore disparate elements, which collide and spark and generate glimpses of harmony that she swims after, witnessing and singing their inherent connections into visible form. And in the end the forms are always "right," both teaching us something and leading us somewhere new. The coracle works.

Rating:
Summary: Great "eye-candy" book, but not for the faint-of-heart
Review: This book is phenomenal. The creativity is unbounded. If you want to see knitting taken where you never would have imagined, this is your book. If you're novice looking for a book to take you a step further, this might be a bit of a shocking step.

Ms. New's imagination and authority in her subject is unquestionable. It is with good reason that this book is more one of general descriptions, plans, ideas and inspiration than of specific, stitch-by-stitch directions. However, her general descriptions could have used a little more flesh to them. I am an advanced knitter who can usually visualize the product before I cast on the first stitch, but some of her directions left me saying, "Huh?" That said, I am confident that if I hold the faith and cast on a few of those stitches, she has provided enough information to guide me to where I need to be. More examples of work in progress would have been very helpful.

Yes, this is eye-candy and inspiration of the first order. Just be aware that this is not a book of hand-held, mindless knitting, but one that requires you invest a lot of yourself in order to knit most of the items.

Rating:
Summary: This book is for everyone, knitter or not
Review: This is a must. IF you knit this book will inspire you endlessly. The projects are so beautiful, and unique. they are explained in a clear manner, but are for the knitter who is a little adventurous. If you are not a knitter and you just enjoy the best in life you will also appreciate this book. I spend hours pouring over it always learning something New. Also, if I am too tired to knit this is the book I have been cuddling up with just wishing. Enjoy!