I’ve never knit a sweater, mainly because I’m intimidated with the whole sleeve shaping, getting exact stitch gauge, getting the fit right, and just the amount of time it would take me to finish one. (I’m currently attempting a sleeveless top, and I keep ripping out what I’ve done because it’s not quite right.)

The Twisted Sisters Knit Sweaters: A Knit-to-Fit Workshop (Knit to Fit Workshop) is designed to help people like me get over their fear of knitting a sweater. It explains how to design a sweater pattern based on your body measurements, and has examples of sweaters made by and for real women that you can use as inspiration for your own sweater designs.

My kind of how-to book, since I never just do projects from books; I always have to change the pattern a little, and most of the time end up with a finished piece that barely resembles the one that inspired it.

One complaint - the sweaters used as examples are all fairly loose fitting. There’s nothing wrong with a loose fitting sweater, of course, except that if this book is a fit workshop, I want to see examples of sweaters that are *really* fitted. I want to feel confident that I could make a form fitting sweater that really fits well. The book doesn’t mention negative ease at all - fitted sweaters are often made with negative ease, which means the fabric measures slightly less than the wearer’s measurements, so that it stretches to fit. Obviously a lot of people don’t want their sweaters to be quite that tight, but I think it’s worth discussing in a book about fit. It *does* mention that if you have a sweater that fits well, you should use its measurements instead of your actual body measurements, so it would still be possible to make a fitted sweater using the formulas in the book, if you own a fitted sweater that you can use for the measurements.

Other than that, I think this is a great book for anyone wanting to get started designing their own knitwear. I’m actually better at crocheting than knitting, but I’m thinking I could use the guidelines in this book to design myself a crocheted sweater.