The up side to knitting on four projects at once is you can change project if, say, small needles are making your hands ache a bit, or you need something small to take out somewhere. The down side is it takes longer to produce a FO to blog about.

Fortunately, I had a delivery of books to talk about in the meantime.

I’ve been trying out Aussie online bookshops lately. These books were ordered from Booktopia. Their prices were a bit cheaper than Fishpond. Since both bookshops took over three weeks to deliver, price will make me lean towards buying from Booktopia, though I’ll probably still compare the two. (Oh, and my wishlist on Fishpond doesn’t automatically update to include changes in prices, which is a bit clunky and confusing.)

Now… the books:

Knit Lit (too)
I bought the first Knit Lit earlier in the year. I haven’t devoured it in a few days like I did the Yarn Harlot book of stories, but it has been a good book to carry around. The stories are often very short – great for reading in queues. I’ve been told Knit Lit (too) is better than the first. It’ll be fun finding out.

Folk Vests
I’ve been gazing wistfully at this online for some time now, but I always prefer to flick through a book before buying it. I was able to do so at the Handweavers and Spinners Guild a month or so back. Unfortunately, when I went back to buy it at the end of class someone else had already grabbed it. It contains lots of interesting designs (not all intarsia or fair isle), but one problem struck me straight away. There are generally only three sizes per vest, and the smallest size for all but one or two designs is much too big for me! For one design the smallest size is 112 cm around… which is going to hang like a sack on someone who has a 86 cm bust.

Knit Fix
This book was a bit of a disappointment, mainly because there’s very little in it that I didn’t already know, or isn’t devastatingly obvious. It would suit somebody who had been knitting a few weeks up to a year, I reckon. I found some inconsistancies in the instructions, too. And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t a mobius strip a strip that has been twisted once, so that if you drew a line with a pen down the centre it would draw on both sides of the strip? The author of this books refers to the double twist that occurs when wrongly joining circular knitting as a mobius strip. Hmm. That sounds rather wrong to me. I kinda wish I hadn’t bought this book. Maybe I’ll sell it.

The Magic of Handweaving
Oh boy. There is so much in this book. And it’s a dangerous little book, because it makes me want to go out and buy a huge floor loom. Some of the information will be very useful for my little ‘knitters’ loom though – like how to stitch a tidy hem so the weft doesn’t unravel.

Final verdict: three good books and one dud.

I’ve had KnitPicks on my yarn shop blacklist ever since I went to their site, filled up my ‘shopping basket’ then discovered they don’t ship outside the US or Canada.

They say: “Our primary reason for this is that we are not able to provide our international customers with the same superior service we provide to our North American customers.”

I say “Phooey!”. In my experience, Aussie Post is far more reliable than the US Postal service. They’re taking no greater risk posting to an Aussie customer than anyone else in the US or Canada.

It’s like they think we’re a third world country. (Or they have hydrophobia?)

Well, if this annoys you (or if you lust after KnitPicks products and hope that begging might persuade them to change their policy) go to the Come On Knitpicks petition site and have your say.

And spread the word. Nothing like bad press in the knit blog world to make a trader think twice.