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Free-Range Knitter by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
Andrews McMeel Publishing
Gentle humor and the love of the craft shine through on every page of "Free-Range Knitter:The Yarn Harlot Writes Again," a collection of short essays and sweet but not saccharine anecdotes.
While it helps to be a knitter or have one in the family, this is as much a book about relationships and how families deal with each other day to day, with knitting just the device to getting into the stories, than just the craft itself.
This is Canadian author Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's second graceful book on the subject; the first, "Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter" was published in 2005. More of her work can be found on her blog.
Each of her short chapters is a pleasure. She devotes one, for example, to a series of letters she exchanged with a customer service representative of a yarn maker (Though I don't know if the letters are real, they ring true and are hilarious.) We read only the rep's responses, and can imagine her letters, in which she tries to obtain a specific yarn she needs to complete a sweater, but it's been discontinued by the company. The tone of the letters goes from that slightly dismissive quality companies often employ (we don't have it, try something else, and oh, we're sort of sorry.) to sheer frustration that the author is still seeking answers to her problem. Rather than rude, the whole exchange is truly amusing and a struggle any consumer can identify with.
Other chapters deal with the deluge of sweaters to a grandson, the jealousy that the knitter's talent seems to trigger, the joys of teaching children, preferably one's own, and the reactions of others to a knitter's public practices of her craft.
This is a joyous book, easily read because it's so well-written, and a great gift for anyone in need of a self-deprecating humor and a lifting of the spirits.
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