I purchased this book from a great little shop in Pagosa Springs - Edelweiss Needlework Chalet. It is quite the chalet, on main street in town, tiny little shop. Good yarn selection, but small.
The first thing I thought when the salesman handed the book to me was, my, what an unfortunate last name. After my 8th-grade gutter mind got over that, I paged through and was hooked, happily made my purchase to a small local business and we were on our way to the Old Fashioned Malt Shoppe, which served their machined malts in paper Coke cups and the place was full of flies. But, this is not a restaurant review, I digress.
The title of the book is highly misleading. These are not projects to be completed in a weekend, rather the theme of the book is relaxed, and weekend-y. Like, if you had a whole weekend to do nothing but knit, drink tea and relax, the book captures that essence. I am a sucker for beautiful imagery, and the book has wonderful photographs of multiple angles of each project. And the variety of projects is great. Your standard scarf and sweater fare, gloves, mittens, and then some unique items, beautiful socks, chair and cushion covers, pillowcase lace. And some ridiculous things, like egg cozies and finger puppets, for the masochists, I guess. My eggs don't need tiny sweaters, and I can't imagine knitting tiny finger puppets with insane detail with tiny needles. But those were the only two projects I deemed totally useless. Out of fifty, not bad.
The projects are really unique, and challenging, and inspiring. You won't find your standard garter-stitch scarf in here. This is not a book for beginners, but it is really great for intermediate knitters needing a challenge, and some projects I consider to still be too advanced for me. But that means I will be using the book for a while. And it has already inspired me to create some designs of my own. There are notes in each project detailing any difficult parts of the pattern, and the patterns are described pretty well. Apparently there were some errors, you can find the corrections online, I have only started one project, the Lopi Lace scarf, so I haven't encountered errors yet.
The yarns called out in the projects are ridiculously expensive. It is easy to trade out yarn, though, which is what I've already done with the Lopi scarf (even if Lopi was dirt-cheap, it feels like a potato sack). I mean, I would never buy a $200 sweater, why the hell would I knit one?
The most fun parts of the book are the extra things thrown in that really complete the weekend-y mood: cookie recipies, how to prepare a relaxing bath, list of movies that have knitting in them, quotes on knitting, how to make a gift basket for a knitter. Fluff, really, but a nice touch. Certainly would not work if all the patterns in the book sucked, but they don't, so it does.
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