Knitting finally takes its rightful place on the spectrum of personal obsessions, alongside golfing, fishing, and gardening. The tangled life of the knitter is the subject of inspired nuttiness in these 300 tongue-in-cheek meditations from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. As any knitter can attest to, this is an activity fraught with guilt, frustration, over-optimism, sly deception, and compulsion, along with passionate moments of creative enlightenment. To soothe the unravelled knitter's soul, Pearl-McPhee has selected some of her favourite quotes to cast off from, and then, like the stand-up comic of the knitting world, she rants, raves, and reflects on the universal experiences that are sure to leave avid knitters in stitches. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee has seen it all - from the deadly "second sock" syndrome, to a house so full of yarn she can't find her washing machine, to desperate all-nighters spent feverishly finishing gifts.

Reviews

Obsessive knitter Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, whose popular knitting blog (www.yarnharlot.com) gets 20,000 hits per day, offers her fellow knitters humorous knitting anecdotes, bits of homespun (no pun intended!) wisdom, helpful tips and little "mantras" to help keep their sanity when realizing an entire sleeve of a sweater has come out wrong and has to be redone. Even nonknitters can appreciate much of her humor-for example, her technique for "darning" socks that have holes in them, "which consists of loudly exclaiming `DARN!' and a few other choice expletives before dropping them in the garbage." Pearl-McPhee has a warm, engaging voice brimming with humor and often punctuated by a self-deprecating chuckle. This audiobook of her folksy ruminations would make the perfect gift for anyone who loves to knit. The print version of this title won the 2006 Benjamin Franklin Award in humor. A Storey Publishing paperback. (July) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

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