Book Review: Warm Days, Cool Knits
Warm Weather Knitting Patterns
Today I am reviewing this wonderful knitting book, Warm Days, Cool Knits, for you dear readers! This is a collection of warm weather knitting patterns by Corrina Ferguson, and it is a fantastic knitting pattern book.
I was fortunate to win this book by listening to The Yarn Thing podcast with Marly Bird. She was interviewing the designer, Corrina Ferguson of Picnic Knits that day. I left a comment on her show notes after listening and won the book and a skein of yarn to make one of the projects. More on that in a bit.
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What’s in this knitting book?
As I listened to the podcast I was perusing photos of the included patterns on Ravelry. After looking, I was very impressed with the lovely projects in this book, so it really was very exciting to win the book!
Here are some of my favorites:
Lovely, aren’t they?! There are 20 patterns in the book, and really there are only a couple that I wouldn’t love to make and wear!
My experience using this knitting book
The yarn that I won was a skein of Hazel Knits Divine. It is aptly named. It is really lovely, soft yarn! This is the exact yarn and colorway for the Emmylou shawl. It is a crescent shaped shawl with an interesting cable-type pattern. It doesn’t look like your typical cable pattern, but utilizes cable techniques and a cable needle.
Truthfully, the first 3 or 4 cable rows had me fuming, since my hands were really struggling to manage the extra cable needle. I found that, in particular, the parts that required my cable needle to hold one stitch to the front were frustrating because that one stitch was too loose to hold onto the cable needle. If I used a larger cable needle, the 2 stitches held to the back were too tight to fit on the needle. This is probably the result of my own quirkiness. I was determined and persevered, and I am glad that I did. After those first 3 or 4 cable rows, they gradually got easier because my hands were getting more used to managing it all. As of now, I am nearing completion of the main body of the shawl, almost time to begin the edging. It is looking very lovely.
This is a good thing. Not only will I have a lovely, soft shawl when I’m done, I will have learned something and improved my knitting skills, and that is worth a little frustration to me. This particular pattern that I am working on relies heavily on charts. I think it’s likely that the other patterns will as well, but I haven’t looked carefully at the others to determine if this is so. If you’re looking for warm weather knitting patterns, and you love using charts, this book should definitely find its way into your library! If you aren’t familiar with knitting charts, check our my tutorial here.
Happy knitting!
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