Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously

by Adrienne Martini

Book Overview

"I knit so I don't kill people" --bumper sticker spotted at Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival

For Adrienne Martini, and countless others, knitting is the linchpin of sanity. As a working mother of two, Martini wanted a challenge that would make her feel in charge. So she decided to make the Holy Grail of sweaters--her own Mary Tudor, whose mind-numbingly gorgeous pattern is so complicated to knit that its mere mention can hush a roomful of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416597646
• ISBN13: 9781416597643
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: Atria Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating for Knitters

This is a rather specialized book, and probably your knitting group rather than your book group would want to read it. But to me it was as addictive as a detective story--I carried it around with me everywhere on the off chance I would have a few minutes to read a little bit more. Adrienne Martini got up inside my head, added some great information furniture, rearranged some of what was already there, and stirred some cobwebs. The chapters follow Martini through the process of acquiring the book containing the pattern, the difficulty of finding the right yarns, the misery of multiple failures at merely counting cast on stitches correctly, the emerging beauty of the pattern's color changes, the satisfying rhythm of the later pattern repeats. Along the way, she makes entertaining and relevant digressions into the histories of Shetland and Fair Isle knitting, Mary Tudor and her clan, Starmore's clashes with yarn makers and web discussion leaders, eBay sellers and yarn shops. She travels to interview some of the major lights of the online knitting world. The main question Martini toted along through the book like a big rock in her knitting bag was, "Does making a small change in a Starmore design (say, substituting a yarn for which the original no longer exists) still make it an Alice Starmore sweater?" Ordinarily this is not something that preoccupies your average knitter, but Starmore has gone to extreme lengths to protect her "brand" and ownership of her creative property, and many of the pattern books are out of print. The original yarns have not been available for years. Ultimately, you have to answer the question for yourself, but reading Sweater Quest will lead you enjoyably to a well-informed choice.

For the Passionate Knitter

I picked up this book expecting one of the recent spate of vaguely knitting oriented mysteries, novels, or tell-alls. Well, no!! This is a book for the serious, dedicated, all-too-human knitter. I began flipping through the pages, and really couldn't put it down. The stories are compelling. There are tidbits of history that I haven't come across in the thorough volumes I've read in the past - No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting, or the older volume by Episcopal Bishop Rutt, A History of Hand Knitting. The author has done her research, and it makes for a surprisingly lively read. The author starts off on a year-long search for the pattern and yarn for a particular Alice Starmore sweater, the Mary Tudor. The sweater is gorgeous, and so is the the story she weaves through her book. Anyone who has knit one of Alice Starmore's stunning and complex sweater's will recognize the familiar points along the way. I won't give away the ending, except to say that my Starmore cardi and I remain friends after 15 years. This would be a great read for an advanced - or rapidly advancing - knitter, or a really lovely gift for someone who loves knitting history, woven into a good story. Enjoy!

Great for Avid Knitters!

I love to knit and am an avid reader of knitting blogs and a member of the online knitting community ravelry. That being said I think this is a fantastic book. The book discusses the major challange undertaken by the author, knitting a a major tour de force, the Tudor sweater by Alice Starmore. Alice Starmore is famous for her beautiful, lovingly designed fair isle sweaters. They aren't easy to do, there are lots of tiny stitches and many colors. I have not knit one although it is something to aspire to. I really enjoyed her journey, the challenge of finding yarn (discontinued), the book with the pattern (out of print) and the discussion of knitting as well as her talking about her life, and the place of knitting in it. If you are a knitter you'll love this book. It has inspired me to begin a Starmore sweater myself. It will be a journey, but well worth while.

A very intelligent knitting book

I love knitting and reading about knitting, and when I saw that this book was about someone knitting an Alice Starmore sweater, I could not wait to start reading it. Like a lot of knitters, I've been very curious about Alice Starmore, yet I've never knitted any of her designs. I've been afraid to. I just had to find out what it was like to work on one, so this book was perfect for me. I've never read Adrienne Martini's blog, even though I read lot of them, and within a couple pages of the book I knew I was really going to like her. Her writing is very funny, and at the same time she's very intelligent. There were a few places where I felt like she was going on a little too much about things like the different styles of knitting, different types of knitting needles, but those parts still had enough humor in them to be readable. The sweater she is knitting in the book is from Alice Starmore's Tutor Roses book, so Adrienne takes a few pages to give us a little Tutor history. That was really interesting and written in a very understandable way. She also writes a lot about Alice Starmore, her legal battles (which I still really don't understand) and gives a very good description of her website, Virtual Yarns. Adrienne tells it like it is with Alice, and I'm not sure if I'd like her as a person, but there's no doubt in my mind she's definitely an artist. Now that I know more about Alice, I went the next step and ordered a kit of hat patterns from her website to try. I just have to see what an "Alice Starmore" will look like for myself. The best part about the book for me was that Adrienne interviews many of the bloggers and knitwear designers I've come to know of over the years of the recent knitting craze. She spends lots of time with the women who write the Mason Dixon blog, Stephanie Pearl McPhee, the founder of Knitty, and others. She writes a little bit about the "knitting/yoga" theory and interviews the woman who started OM Yoga, who is also a knitter. Another interesting thing she does is attend a Knitter's Review Workshop, which I've read about for years. All through the book she's working on her sweater and really, the hardest part sounded like finding the yarn to make it with. That is a little bit of an adventure in itself and since she isn't able to find an exact match for a couple of the yarns, she has a question to ask of everyone she interviews - is it an Alice Starmore if you change anything (or something like that). It was a very interesting question that made me think about a lot of the designs I've knitted. That's what I liked about the writing of this book - it definitely took knitting out of the "old lady" thing to something serious to think about. It asks a lot of questions about why we knit and things like that, and definitely made me glad I have such a wonderful hobby!

One Woman. One Sweater. One Year. One Fabulous Journey.

It seems like such a silly idea: A memoir about knitting a sweater? But like Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (who makes an appearance), Martini isn't really writing about knitting. She's writing about knitters. Mostly, just one knitter. Over the course a year, Martini sets out to complete a sweater known as "Mary Tudor". As she tackles the challenges of acquiring an out-of-print pattern and substituting for out-of-production yarns (no small feat for a project in which color is key) as well as stranded colorwork and steeking, she gathers together details about the designer, Alice Starmore. She explores why knitters are so attracted to Starmore's famously difficult-to-obtain and difficult-to-knit patterns, and how far they can stray from the designer's vision yet still remain faithful to the project. Martini travels to Rhinebeck, Nashville, and Toronto to interview bloggers well-known to knitters around the world. The history of Tudor Roses and the Alice Starmore brand intertwine with the history of knitting in the Shetland Isles and North America and the life one particular American woman in the early twenty-first century. Witty and self-deprecating, Martini doesn't hesitate to share her liberal leanings or drop the occasional curse word. Her writing style is clean and sharp, a pleasure to read. She's clearly aware of the absurdity of her "quest", which just makes it all the more enjoyable.