The Knitting Fiend

Some of you may have seen “Mason Dixon Knitting“^blog; it’s a recently published book filled with interesting advanced beginner to intermediate knitting projects. It’s selling like hot-cakes.

I was surfing at Amazon.com today, and it turns out the book is currently ranked 729. That means it’s currently outselling The Yarn Harlot’s “Knitting Rules“^blog (which is ranked #1167). Wow!

Of course, it seems hardly surprising that a nicely organized book filled with useful patterns would do well. So, why does this cause me to break out of my usual “tips and haiku” mold? Well, I couldn’t help remembering that last May the book was violently panned at “knitflame”, an email list of perennial fault finders. Given the success of the book, my favorite comment is:

I completely agree with you. I too, have looked at the book several times and don’t find anything appealing about any of the projects. There is nothing new in the book– it is just more mitered squares and dish rags. Apparently loads of people love to knit these things, but we call them dishrags for a reason at my house. I will be watching to see how quickly some of the new “blogs into books” wind up on the half-price (or less) rack at the bookstore.

Well, looks like that gloomy prediction was a bit off! (Probably because the dishrags and mitered square afghans in that book are darn cute.)

Then another thing happened to make me muse: I read two bloggers posting similar sounding complaints about books by wildly popular bloggers plus I read someone complaining about bad new knitting books on KnitU’s email list! The comments were hauntingly similar to those about Mason Dixon Knits . Few sound like honest imboased criticism; they tend to sound like “big blogger” envy.

The comments I read today made me think, “Hmmm…Have I recently seen a cute knitting books written by a popular blogger?”

The answer is, “Why yes! I have!” Printed in black and white mixing musings, patterns, and tips the recent “big blogger bood” I saw reminded me abit of my early edition of “Knitting Without Tears“.

If history repeats itself, recently published, rated 5 stars at Amazon, “Wendy Knits“^{blog will do well!}