Susanna
Sep 3, 20213 min
It's been a veritable dearth of new knitting book titles for the past couple of quarters but things are now starting to pick up. Hey, there's more than one page! Here are my impressions of the new offerings on the Coming Soon list on Amazon.
TV- and movie-inspired knitwear has been quite popular for a number of years now. The latest craze began with Outlander, continued with Star Wars, and has now made it to wizard fantasy and animation. In a way, the phenomenon has now become full circle: Interweave's The Unofficial Harry Potter Knits started it all in 2013. This publication was so unofficial they had to strip off any references to the movie franchise.
Eight years on and things have changed. WB and Rowling are milking their IP cash cow and are now coming out with the second official Harry Potter knits book. Harry Potter Knitting Magic: More Patterns From Hogwarts and Beyond is a follow-up to the first volume published in January 2020. The second volume, containing 28 all-new Harry Potter inspired patterns, comes out on October 26, 2021.
The second franchise knits book to appear this fall is Knitting with Disney: 28 Official Patterns Inspired by Mickey Mouse, The Little Mermaid, and More! Although Disney animations are timeless, my mind can't help but to go to those totally 1990s intarsia sweaters.
I hope this book updates the Disney knitwear look to... something else. Anything else. Knitting with Disney comes out on November 9, 2021.
A non-Amazon sidebar: Novita are also jumping on the animation bandwagon and have released a booklet of Moomin-themed kids' knits. For the time being these patterns are only available in print and in Finnish although Novita are working on the possibility of getting them translated.
Colorwork is still king, queen, and even the crown prince. The Coming Soon list is chock-full of colorwork books in the Scandinavian, Latvian, and Selbu traditions.
Linka Neumann's Wilderness Knits: Scandi-Style Jumpers for Adventuring Outdoors is finally getting an English translation. The Norwegian original, Villmarksgensere, was published in 2019 and the sequel Villmarksgensere 2 in 2020. I'm sure an English edition of the second volume is already on the horizon. Wilderness Knits is released on September 14, 2021.
Another book that promises to bring more Nordic-style colorwork knits is Kristin Drysdale's The Nordic Knitting Primer: A Step-by-Step Guide to Scandinavian Colorwork. If the cover design is anything to judge by, colorwork yoke sweaters are still going strong this fall. The Nordic Knitting Primer will be out on October 5, 2021.
Even more colorwork will hit the virtual bookshelves with Anne Bårdsgård's Selbu Patterns (September 14), Ieva Ozolina's Knit Like a Latvian (October 12), and Guðrún Hannele Henttinen's Icelandic Mittens (November 9), to name just a few.
The 80s called and they want their knits back! Current fashion trends are pretty 90s-inspired but this book takes you back another decade to the tacky and colorful 1980s. Sandy Black's Classic Knits of the 1980s looks to be full of intarsia, Kaffe Fassett-isms, and animal prints.
Contemporary photography, together with original images from the 1980s, illustrates the designs' timeless appeal, with close-up images of intricate pattern details and suggested design variations to aid creative knitters inspired by this pivotal decade.
Umm, can't wait. Classic Knits of the 1980s comes out on September 1, 2021.
Which new title are you most looking forward to? Let me know in the comments. 👇
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