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Title: Harmony Guide: Lace & Eyelets: 250 Stitches to Knit (The Harmony Guides)
ISBN: 1596680571
Author:
Publicate Date: 2007-10-01
Publish: 2007-10-01
List Price: $22.95
Average Customer Rating: 3.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $14.17
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $13.00
Amazon Merchant Price: $15.61
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Colorful, but lacking
After all the hoopla about the Harmony series, I bought this book with great expectations. I found it disappointing. While there are many color photos, I found the pictures lacked depth and contrast - I couldn't "read" the stitches. I see no improvement over (and a lot of redundancy with) the classic black and white Barbara Walker treasuries. (While they may be dated, there's a reason why they're still in print and rarely available at a discount.)
Let you think I'm biased towards black and white, a great example of good color photography that shows stitches clearly is the Nicky Epstein series of "Over the edge" books. Those also had the advantage of showing an entire piece of knitting -- you can see if a given stitch pattern would pull in or expand. I'm sticking with the Treasuries.
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2: Terrible Instructions
I have to agree with others who find the instructions for these patterns bewildering. I'm especially irked at the "twisted" knit stitches, and yet nowhere, even in the glossary, is there a description of these stitches. I believe this book was written with British instructions and abbreviations, and was not updated for the American market. Sad, but the stitches are very inspiring, and the photos are helpful. I don't mind the missing charts, either, I find it easier to work from the written directions, but I am still disappointed in this book.
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3: Very Disappointed
Though this is a lovely book I was very disappointed. The lace patterns are eclectic. The texture of the finished patterns are coarse, bulky and hold little resemblance to what I think of as lace.
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4: Ok, so I don't knit lace
I am a man who, I can say, has only wore lace twice in my life that I know of, LOL, Halloween two different times. I got this book to round out my Harmony collection but I found some really good stuff in it that has inspired me to try some table linen and hat projects.
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5: YF should be YO in Every Single Pattern!!!!!!!!
The abbreviation YF (Yarn Forward) is mistakenly used for YO (Yarn Over) in EVERY SINGLE PATTERN! How did this make it into print? Did someone try to do a last minute global search and replace on one paragraph and ended up doing it for the entire manuscript? Erika Knight, do you still have a job? I won't go near anything with your name on it again, that's for sure. If anyone had any integrity that would have recalled this book so they could insert some kind of correction. Just unbelievable.
"So, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, How did you enjoy the play." Actually other than that one tiny oversight, the book is remarkable (in this day of careless editing) error free with a couple of exceptions. The YO for YF will be obvious to anyone already familiar with eyelet and lace patterns or even those who aren't as you really can't knit for very long when the pattern only calls for decreases, but never adds any stitches back with increases.
Charts would have been nice, but they aren't a deal breaker for me, especially since most of the patterns have short repeats that are easy to memorize, once you read through the unnecessarily long winded an sometimes confusing abbreviations. The pattern are attractive to my eye and nicely photographed with a good sized color sample. I expect to find uses for many of them. I own Vol. I and II of Barbara Walkers stitch dictionaries and while there is some overlap, there is plenty that is new here. The thing that irks me the most though is the complete lack of organization. Similar patterns are randomly scattered all over the place. Stitches should have been arranged by either related patterns or width of repeat. It also would have been nice to have known the source for the patters and some suggestions on the weight of yarn they look best with and suggested uses, like Walker does in her chatty pattern books. All in all, it is a nice collection of lace and eyelets and if you are lover of these kind of pattern well worth adding to your collection if you don't mind rewarding incompetent editing, just be sure to download the errata file. I would have given the book 3 stars otherwise and after some consideration decided to only take it down 1 star because once you realize the error it is not difficult to correct, even though part of me thinks they deserve 0 star.
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