Best Knitting Books of 2008

This book is full of super-cute hats, scarves and mittens for little kids, inspired by animals real and fanciful. They might just get your little critter to wear a hat and scarf out of the house, or at least give them a fun homemade option for dressing up at playtime.

If you've ever wanted to learn how to knit intarsia, this is the book for you. And if you're already a devoted intarsia fan, you'll love this book not only for the fun patterns but for the bunches of sample motifs you can use in your own projects.

Nancy Bush's Knitted Lace of Estonia is a beautiful book that is sure to inspire more people to want to knit lace. It's full of lovely patterns you'll want to make for yourself and the very special people in your life, as well as telling the history of this specialized art form.

Kelley Deal of the Breeders is not only an accomplished musician, she's also a great knitter. Her book full of bags of all shapes and sizes is a great one for people who are already obsessed with bags, or for those who need a few more creative ways to carry around their stuff.

Nicky Epstein is always coming up with innovative and beautiful ways to knit, and this book devoted to scarves is no exception. All sorts of interesting design and finishing techniques are used in these scarves (some of which are more about fashion than warmth) and there are plenty of ideas for making your own signature projects.

As you work through a sweater pattern -- whether from a published source or one of your own design -- there are many decisions you make or techniques you can use that will determine if your sweater is as successful as it can be. Margaret E. Fisher shares some of those potential pitfalls that she's seen in her years working with the Master Knitter program at the Knitting Guild Association.

The Mason-Dixon knitters are back with a book designed to take the fear out of knitting with color or making gifts for little humans and others you might want to knit for, as well as more fun projects for the kitchen knit with the ever-popular kitchen cotton.

Most of us understand that knitting is good for us, serving as a form of meditation and stress relief (plus, at the end, we get a sweater or something), but knitting can also serve as a catalyst for change in other people, whether we're knitting for charity or using our stitches as a way to protest situations in the world we aren't happy with. This book guides readers from the personal to an understanding of how knitting can change the world.

You might not have thought there was such a thing as knitting cartoons or, if there were, that there couldn't possibly be enough of them for a book, but knitter and blogger Franklin Habit provides a fun little book full of knitting-themed cartoons, as well as a few essays on this knitting life.

Cables are a wonderful way to add texture and interest to a piece of knitting, and Melissa Leapman is a master of using these twists and turns in innovative ways that look a bit like magic and provide fun new roads for even experienced cable knitters to travel.