I purchased this book in April of 2018. I was under enough deadlines when it arrived that I placed it on my bookshelf without much more than a glance. Just recently I’ve had the time and mental space to pull it out again and really look through it.
Now that I’ve had a chance to really look, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this book!! You know how the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes after he sees something he hadn’t even considered before? Well, I’m pretty sure my brain grew three sizes after looking through this book.
I spent hours pouring over this book after I opened it. I kept stopping my mathematically minded sons and husband as they walked past my desk to show them the charts and symbols. I tried explaining to them how the new way of visually representing the stitches with different notations and having no words at all on page after page felt so liberating and amazing. They were not properly impressed.
Many of the stitch patterns in the book are not completely new to me. I own at least 9 other stitch dictionaries and I pour over most of them every time I sit down to start building responses to submission calls. So I hold a lot of different stitch possibilities in my mind. But even the ones that feel somewhat familiar aren’t quite the same – the stitches are twisted to help them pop of the background better or the cables are smaller or the simply the “normal” way of representing the stitches is just different enough that it sparks my brain in a way that I haven’t felt for ages.
I’ve already got three designs on the needles and a line of others percolating in my mental queue inspired by ideas I saw in this book. Plus I can’t wait to try some of the things in there that caught my attention even if they’ll never end up as a design.
Also, turns out this is actually Hitomi Shida’s second stitch dictionary! Her first collection of 250 knitting stitches is being re-released later this year in English for the first time. So now I’m wondering, can I wait that long? Do I just want to try to pick up an older copy of the original in what they call “simplified Chinese”? Or do I need to study side by side? I haven’t decided yet. But I do know that I’ll be picking up one or both versions of it before the end of the year.
