Book Review: Sweater Quest by Adrienne Martini

After finding this book mentioned on Ravelry and seeing as I’m on a bit of a Starmore-fest at the moment, I figured it would be a nice change to read something that didn’t involve lifting flaps or squeaking for a change.

Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously by Adrienne Martini covers the year in her life when she decided to tackle one of Alice Starmore’s harder patterns (“hard” is probably subjective when it comes to our Alice), Mary Tudor. Add in the fact that the pattern is in the out-of-print Tudor Roses and the original yarns are no longer available and it’s a task that many of us would just not even attempt and go and cast on a garter stitch scarf instead.

Adrienne Martini starts the book with a brief explanation of the difference in intarsia and fair isle knitting for the uninitiated, her trials in learning to knit with the yarn in her left hand and includes a potted geography lesson, after solemnly assuring her readers that “there is an actual Fair Isle”. (I appreciate this is for readers who probably aren’t in the UK and don’t know every single tiny island in the British Isles, but it tickled me.)

However, she makes up for it with a nicely condensed explanation of why Alice Starmore is known in some parts as the Litigious Scottish Designer – more of which can be found in thegirlfromauntie’s Alice Chronicles (can only find part one at the moment) which I read myself a while back and if it’s all you ever knew of a person, might make you just look over your shoulder for daring to type her name.

So as she has neither book nor yarn for her Mary Tudor, she then has to take a deep breath and part with silly money on an eBay auction for the book and then hunt down substitute yarn for the pattern. The geek in me liked seeing her table of yarn colours in AS’s old yarn, the new colours she had to buy and the amounts needed, given that the yarns had different yardages. I also liked reading about the efforts to find one particular colour and I really wanted more minute detail like this because it’s the sort of thing I love. But then I’m the sort of person who collects shade cards.

She does also give us a little history lesson about the Tudors and berates the BBC for The Tudors drama series not being historically accurate (which in my mind is a bit like complaining that Star Trek doesn’t accurately represent alien life forms) but it’s all good fun.

What really bothers me is that it ends up not so much a book about the trials of knitting a difficult pattern – that ends up becoming pretty much a sub plot – and concentrates more on her travelling around Canada and North America to meet the great and good of the online knitting community. She attempts to tie this to the sweater by asking everyone the same question about whether they feel her sweater is an actual Starmore, being as she isn’t using AS’s yarn. But more time is spent talking about the people she meets, finding out their “how I started knitting” stories and visiting yarn shops and detailing the different yarns she buys. Occasionally she mentions how far she has progressed, but it’s mentioned as an aside, and only when she is cutting the sleeve steeks does the sweater get centre stage again.

I suspect what I expected/wanted was a book version of a knitting blog. There are times, when she talks about casting on 300+ stitches for example, that you know on a knit blog there would be a photo of the cast-on row. Or when she cuts the sleeve steeks, there would be a triumphant photo of her wielding the scissors with a hole in her knitting. But THERE ARE NO PHOTOS, save for one black-and-white author photo in the inside of the back cover which shows the sweater to bust-height. And this is a tragedy. I don’t need to see her standing smiling with Amy from Knitty or Stephanie Pearl McPhee or any other knitblogger she has met. I DO need sweater porn. I need stripy steeks and neckbands and close-ups of the stitch pattern. She describes how the colours in her swatch blend together so apparently effortlessly apart from the one dud colour (which is replaced). Why can’t I see this?

I won’t say how the book ends, though you may easily guess. But it left me feeling it had been rushed in order to meet her publishing deadline and though it was an entertaining and quick read, I felt unsatisfied, as if something key was missing from the story. I can’t help but think that the perfect ending would have been for Adrienne to put her question about whether the sweater was an actual Starmore to the woman herself.