Jillian’s Spinning: My Favorite Books of the Year 2015

Jillian’s Favorite Books of the Year

Longtime Knitty readers know that I write most of the book reviews for Knitty. I am a craft book lover, my house is filled with bookcases, library carts and stacks of books. In all of the years I’ve reviewed books for Knitty it never gets old; I still am thrilled when a book shaped package comes in the mail. The books I’ve shown above are my favorites for this year. They represent, above all, a passion for their topic. They are original and the how-to parts of the how-to books are spot on. They all, self published or big publisher published, have a personalty, they convey the joy each writer has for their subject. They are all books that I have learned from, that I have, or will, read from cover to cover more than once. They brought more to my life than a craft, they brought knowledge and tapped into my curiosity.

Here’s the list with links:

Sequence Knitting
The Shepherd’s Life
How to Weave a Bag on a Box
Rebecca Ringquist’s Embroidery Workshops
The Modern Natural Dyer

You might notice that there is not a spinning book on that list. It’s not becasue no wonderful spinning books were published this year because there were. It’s because the spinning world lost a great this year and I want to honor him by choosing his book, still one of the best ever published, as my spinning book of the year.

Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning

If you haven’t read the beautiful words Margalit Fox wrote for the New York Times, take a minute to read about a man who brought so much life to our craft.