Kaffe Fassett's Glorious Color Book Review by ChristineMM

Title: Kaffe Fassett's Glorious Color: Sources of Inspiration for Knitting and Needlepoint with 17 Projects (1988)

Author: Kaffe Fassett

My Star Rating: 5 stars out of 5 = I Love It

Summary: Another Great Book by Kaffe Fassett, The Subtitle Says It All





This is Kaffe Fassett's second book featuring knitting in color and this book features needlepoint also. As with the Introduction to the first book Glorious Knitting, Fassett tells the story of how he began his artistic career in fine art painting and dove into knitting suddenly, after visiting a Scottish yarn factory, seeing so many different colored yarns and feeling inspired. An American who moved to London, Fassett sought artistic inspiration at the Victoria and Albert Museum's fine art and tapestries which he interpreted into knitting and needlepoint.

Fassett explains he also travels around the world finding inspiration in cultural sights, architecture and traditional patterns and colors used by other cultures. The book features full color photographs of knitting and needlepoint as well as inspirational items and travel scenes.

Fassett's technique is described in general, i.e. toothed stripe, carpet stripe, and he gives the original inspiration for them and gives ideas for creating our own designs.

A pattern is provided for his knitwear designs.

Needlepoint is featured but to a lesser degree than knitting.

What I enjoy about this book and other books by Kaffe Fassett (besides the inspiring color photographs) is that Fassett openly shares his process and thought behind his patterns which allows the reader to develop their own creations. He does not hide his discovered secrets and techniques by ONLY giving us patterns to copy directly. For example he says on page 32, "if you tone from dark to medium to light and back again you cannot go wrong" when explaining how to use three colors in striped patterns of your own choosing.

As with his first book Glorious Knitting, this book provides eye candy inspiration and patterns for knitters and needlepoint artists (even if the 17 patterns provided are not used by the reader).

Glorious Color is quite similar to Glorious Knitting almost like a companion; the two are very similar. If you can't get enough with Glorious Knitting you should read or buy Glorious Color to add to your book collection.






Disclosure: I read a library copy of this book. For my blog's full disclosure statement see the link at the top of my blog's sidebar.