Book Review & Giveaway: Knitting Modular Shawls, Wraps and Stoles

Storey Publishing provided a copy of Knitting Modular Shawls, Wraps and Stoles for my review. The opinions expressed here are my own. This post contains affiliate links.

Melissa Leapman’s Knitting Modular Shawls, Wraps and Stoles is a book I’ve been eagerly anticipating. For one thing, it has stitch patterns (whoo hooo!). For another, it explains how to design stuff. Both of those make it a Big Win in my opinion.

The Concept

Imagine being able to knit an infinite variety of beautiful shawls with just some basic knowledge. You would start with just a few stitches, then increase on right-side rows to create a triangle. The placement of the increases would change the arrangement of the triangles and thus the shape of the shawl.

You could change up stitch patterns and choose from a variety of borders. You could choose your favorite yarn in any weight, and know that you’d be creating a lovely wrap.

The book serves as a sort of recipe book for shawls. Melissa explains the logic behind the construction of various shapes shapes, and provides a stitch dictionary full of stitch patterns to be used in their creation. Each stitch pattern includes both written and charted instructions.

The Designs

If you don’t feel like working that hard (although really it’s not that hard at all), you can just knit one of the lovely designs from the patterns Melissa designed.

There are big ones and little ones and lacy ones and solid ones and triangular ones and … You get the idea.

So let’s see: We have shawls that everyone in every size can wear, and you can knit them with whatever yarn you want in whatever size you want, and you can choose the stitch pattern and make it entirely your own. Really, what’s not to love?

The Giveaway

The Giveaway has ended. Congratulations to Barbara R, the lucky winner!

All images excerpted from Knitting Modular Shawls, Wraps, and Stoles© by Melissa Leapman. Photography © by Melinda DiMauro. Used with permission from Storey Publishing.