Review: Yarn Harlot (the Secret Life of a Knitter) by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Yay for Friday!  I'm so glad that it's the weekend, and not just any weekend, but a three-day weekend!  It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday in the States, and my office has all government holidays off.  So I'm very much looking forward to three glorious days off.  Especially tomorrow.  David isn't working, we're not traveling out of state...this is a good thing.  I'm very excited to curl up in front of the TV tomorrow with my knitting.

And speaking of knitting...

Considering that the title of this blog is Read~Knit~Blog, it was only a matter of time before I read a knitting-oriented book (not a pattern book, I don't think those count) and reviewed it.  It was the first book I purchased for the Kindle (still happy in its little green case), and I finished it during the snow day we had on Wednesday, along with the other two books I was trying to finish all at the same time.

I discovered the Yarn Harlot (real name: Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) in early 2008.  My apartment  had been broken into (on Christmas Eve, no less) and I was feeling very violated and uncomfortable.  I met up with a dear friend of mine at Atlanta Bread Company in Manchester to do a little knitting.  It was then that she wrote down the words "Yarn Harlot" on a scrap piece of paper and told me to check out her blog.  And it was really all downhill from there.

I never knew that knitting could be a lifestyle.  I never knew that there really were people out there for whom knitting was that important.  Stephanie's blog was funny, endearing, and inspirational.  To a knitter (like me) who was still struggling with the fear of branching out past the garter stitch scarf...Stephanie was like a knitting goddess.  Not only did she knit pretty much everything, she wasn't scared to try new things.  She said "If you screw up, you pull it out and start over.  It's just knitting."  And the realization hit me, over time.  If I screwed something up, if I dropped a stitch, if I knit where I should have purled...oh well.  Nobody was going to die because of my mistakes.  Yeah, I'd be irritated, but if that's the worst than could happen?  Clearly it wasn't the end of the world.

This isn't the first of Stephanie's books that I've read.  I picked up Knitting Rules! last year and read it from cover to cover in about a day.  All of her books are quick reads, but Knitting Rules was more of a book about the philosophy of knitting itself.  Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter, Stephanie's first book, is written in the exact style of her blog entries: snippets of a life lived after falling headlong into knitting, and having no shame of it.  It's not a book so much as a collection of short stories, where Stephanie endearingly pokes fun at herself as she encounters one knitting escapade after another.

I doubt anyone who isn't a knitter would pick up Yarn Harlot, as it is primarily found in the knitting or craft section of bookstores and libraries.  But feel confident in saying that anyone who has a passion (re: obsession) for a craft or skill would understand where Stephanie is coming from when she writes.  I haven't met her on one of her many book tours (yet), but I would be honored to make her acquaintance.  She is not only a wonderful writer and a sometime comedienne, she is a huge philanthropist.  In December of 2004, in response to the tsunami disaster, Stephanie founded Tricoteuses Sans Frontieres (English: Knitters Without Borders), to raise money for the international foundation Doctors Without Borders -- medical staff that travel to places in extreme need of disaster relief.  In the six years and one month since their inception, the Knitters Without Borders have raised $1,062,217 in funding for MSF.

Good on you, Steph.  This wasn't my first Yarn Harlot book, and it won't be my last.

Rating: ****