Book Review- Knitted Letters

Knitted Letters- Make Personalized Gifts and Accents with Creative Typography-Based Projects by Catherine Hirst and Erssie Major is a knitting book full of great ideas for knitting with typography. It's suitable for all knitting skill levels.

The introduction includes how to customize projects, information about yarn and gauging and fairly complete diagrams for a beginning knitter.
The beginning knitter instruction include:

• Casting on
• casting off
• knit stitch
• purl stitch
• increasing
• decreasing
• picking up stitches
• different seam methods
• working with colors including Fair Isle, intarsia and color changes

So for the complete beginner who is patient and able to learn from books and diagrams, this will get them started. Then you get into the projects.

The projects all include lettering of course, just letters by themselves, or words. Most of them are very simple with good charts, and a lot of them are the kinds of projects I like best, functional and interesting. Yarns are listed by brands and weights, and needles are listed by US size and MM.

My favorite stranded projects include the Slab Serif collegiate looking children's backpack, the French press cozy with the word CAFE in a stenciled inspired font (pictured on the cover) and calligraphic black letter e-reader cover with the words "ex libris".  There are a lot more projects than that, including some great children's projects.

The 3D letters pictured on the cover are more involved with more seaming and shaping, and more advanced knitters would have fun with those. As well as the LOVE pillows, there are also bookends that are the letters A and Z for witty knitty fun. 

At the end of the book are alphabets in the same style as the project instructions. You will find Sans Serif, Serif , Black Letter and Script in both upper and lower case letters, Slab Serif, Stenciled, Circus and Western in upper case so you can develop your own patterns with those. Numbers and Punctuation are only offered in one font style, a very clean Sans Serif. 

This is a fun themed book. My daughter and I will be using it often in projects of our own designs and the projects included are easy to customize to our own tastes. It's one that I recommend to beginning and intermediate knitters, and to font addicted crafters. 

Published by Chronicle Books

I received a complimentary copy of this book to review, I received no other compensation, and my review is my honest opinion of the book. You can read more about my review policy here.