Available now at LYS, my favorite magazine of the year (so far!). Knitting Traditions from Interweave Press. Stop in for your copy today, this is a special issue.

Indulge your passion for knitting with Knitting Traditions! This 148-page special publication from PieceWork magazine presents more than 40 projects—socks, shawls and scarves, items for baby, a variety of hand coverings, hats, squares and edgings, and finger puppets—each with a story that provides historical context. Here are just a few examples: Peruvians used a technique—knitting’s precursor—called cross looping or needleknitting to fashion exquisite, tiny figures, using cactus thorns as needles, between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200. Fourteenth-century Italian artists painted pictures of the Madonna knitting. A glove with a romantic history knitted in Sweden during the sixteenth-century is preserved in a museum. Swedish knitters have been using the two-end technique since at least the seventeenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century, Russian shawls from Orenburg achieved international status. Prolific Victorian knitters fashioned all sorts of knitted items in the nineteenth century. German designers were producing hundreds of patterns for “art knitting” in the early decades of the twentieth century. And a veritable “Who’s Who” of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century knitting designers share their passion within these pages!

*image & text courtesy Interweave Press