Loop Loves Books

Print is not dead! ~The Guardian reported this week, that sales of ebooks have dropped by 17%, while sales of ‘real’ books are up 8%!

Hurray! We love Ravelry and digital patterns, but it’s such a joy to slowly turn the pages of a craft publication and savour the beautiful things we can make. Holding a beautifully printed book in your hand with the texture and smell of good paper, and the way images look, printed in ink on surface, rather than looking at a screen – there’s nothing like it!

There aren’t many places you can visit to peruse craft books, but we still have a cosy book corner at Loop. It’s brimming with tons of books on everything from sock knitting, historical craft, hand-dyeing to Japanese stitch dictionaries.

Let me show you some of the treasures that have recently arrived…

New Books

At Loop we’re always on the lookout for beautiful craft books, even if they aren’t in English. Charted knitting and crochet patterns can easily be conveyed through symbol craft, so we don’t shy away from carrying Japanese, Chinese, or European language books for these crafts.

One of our latest finds is Selbuvotter, a stunning new book from Norway, featuring over 300 pages of photographs and charts of traditional Norwegian mittens. If you love stranded knitting, you won’t want to miss this book!

It’s an incredible visual resource of the rich history of the Selbuvotter patterns and the importance of their place in the society and economy of the Selbu region of Norway. It includes over 40 different thumb motifs, as well as over 350 photos with charts.

Patterns for stranded or ‘Fair Isle’ yarns are particularly easy to grasp, whichever language they are in, so if you can’t get enough of these easy to read charts, check out our selection of Japanese books. We are getting more in all the time.

One recent beauty is, Knitting Patterns of Shetland!

Which includes some stunning finished garments, swatches and charts of traditional Fair Isle designs.

We’ve just added a new Fair Isle class to our schedule, in case you want to learn.

If you love new twists on traditional techniques, check out Kate Davies books. Her new booklet, Inspired by Islay is now in stock.

I probably don’t need to tell you how good her patterns are, as a quick look at Ravelry will reveal her popularity. We saw some beautiful examples of her Oa pattern, in Edinburgh.

We have a selection of books about dyeing, felting and spinning too. We’ve been following the beautiful Instagram feed of Rebecca Desnos, where we learned about her self-published book, Botanical Colour at your Fingertips.

You will treasure the inspiration of her photographs if you love the subtle colours of nature.

She instructs how to produce a wide palette of colours, including pink from avocados, yellow from pomegranates and coral from eucalyptus leaves. She also teaches how to achieve rich, long-lasting colours with those tricky plant fibres (cotton and linen) using the ancient method of soya milk mordanting. Her dye formulas produce reliable colours that withstand washing and exposure to light.

We can’t wait to experiment with our garden and kitchen gleanings.

Rebecca also has a magazine out. But we’ll save that for our post in in a couple weeks time, when we invite you to explore some of our exciting new periodicals.