Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Lea Redmond’s Knit the Sky, as the title says, it’s not a crochet book. It isn’t a traditional knitting book, either. It’s a book of project ideas open to personal interpretation. You could take one of Redmond’s ideas and craft it in many mediums. It’s not going to be a book for everyone, but I think, for the crafter looking for inspiration and with enough personal vision to “see” their project before it’s finished, this is a wonderful resource. 

So what’s in this book? There are 32 projects. Each chapter outlines an idea for a project with some options and variations on how one might work the particular project in different ways. Redmond wends through nature, life events, mindfulness exercises, and other ideas to create a calming mix of projects that could be created in knitting or crochet or weaving or quilting or painting or drawing. 

The thing that seems to bother some people about this book is that the projects don’t come with a “cast on 15 and work some knitting stitch for this set number of rows to complete this project that I have provided you with a picture of so you can see if you will like it”. There aren’t, they complain, even pictures of finished projects by the author. Instead there are calming drawings in aesthetic colors of everything from inspiration to drawn finished projects. Some reviewers have indicated that these illustrations make the book read as a children’s book, which shocks me and makes me think some people need to learn to appreciate drawings a bit more. I mean, the Kama Sutra is illustrated, too. Just saying.

So why doesn’t this book provide the reader with a clear pattern for every project? Because this book isn’t giving you a paint-by-numbers equivalent of a knitting project. It is giving you an idea and then inviting you to continue the story, but depart the text, to vastly misquote Berkeley Breathed in A Wish for Wings that Work. This is an invitation to get some yarn, clear your head, and create your own work. Perhaps you read the section on “Heirloom Time Traveler” and decide not to leave a half finished project for a future generation to find and finish, but instead to create a gift for your great great grandchild and leave it with your fifteen year old grandchild for someday. Or perhaps the gift is for your fifteen year old grandchild to open someday in the far future that you are not part of anymore when they really need one last gift from you. There are no wrong projects in this book, just jumping off places to explore your own way of creating.

If you need a strict plan for how to execute a project and what it will look like when you are done, this is not your book. If you are just getting started on your own creative stuff or you find yourself working through a creative block and want a little nudge, this is your book. Perhaps you won’t end up creating any of the projects described but instead will find yourself wandering off into new creative areas of your own. That, my reader, is a wonderful gift for any book to grant.

Knit the Sky is, of course, out of print. There are used copies floating around and, at least in my neck of the woods, several available at the local library.