This is a bit of a rant, and it's kind of long, because I'm putting the details in.
I have Ann Feitelson's book, _The Art of Fair Isle Knitting: history, technique, colors & patterns_. I got it because of the extremely detailed explanation of colorwork choices (I'm very weak on that). I have not actually knitted any of the patterns she put in it. I _love_ the book. But I do have one complaint about the book.
I've used Google and found _nothing_ about my particular complaint anywhere, barring one online book review a long time ago that mentioned there were lots of typos in the patterns and charts. I tried searching for "errata", "corrections", "errors"... nothing. My complaint isn't about the patterns and charts, it's even more basic than that, and as near as I can tell, there's nothing about it on the net anywhere. So I'm putting it here.
My complaint is about the artist who (re)drew the technique illustrations. I truly believe she is not a knitter. The credits page says: Illustration by Susan Strawn. I'm naming the name because there is a real problem. _Many_ of the drawings are just plain wrong.
page 56, ill. 2-5 : the caption says the method of holding both strands of yarn in the left hand is a mirror-image of the Shetland method in illustration 2-2. The caption sounds good, but the actual illustration for 2-5 is just the 2-2 drawing photo-reversed! That makes it look as though the knitter is knitting left-to-right and doing otherwise the same thing as in 2-2. It manifestly does not illustrate what the caption describes! I don't know whether it's the artist or the editor, but that's lazy and ignorant work. I'm fairly sure it's the artist, because several illustrations show the yarn going the wrong way, as well as simply a totally wrong technique for the caption.
The editor is at fault too, because there are places - more than one - where the photos illustrating the results of different kinds of work are not placed with the captions that belong to them, thereby ruining the demonstration. Page 58: a series of photos showing what happens when you strand differently with the intended background color (held either under, over, or randomly changing) has the photos shifted down the page one step. Caption 2-8a belongs with the photo in the middle of the page, 2-8b belongs with the photo on the bottom of the page, and 2-8c belongs with the photo on the top of the page! Now, I know that the colors work that way because I found it out myself back in the 1970s, knitting a mitten with one-stitch stripes, but the new knitter who is trying to learn it from this book will be either confused or depressed, depending on whether they believe the the text or the evidence of their own eyes. I'm angry, because a good teaching method has been destroyed by an idiot.
Page 66, Ill. 2-20: In 2-20a and 2-20b, the position of stitches on the needles on the left is wrong consistently. Since the intention is to show and contrast knitting through the front or the back of the loops, this is a major error. In 2-20b the intention of showing K2tog through the back loop, a left slanting decrease, is totally lost, since the picture shows a basic SSK for the result. I suppose that's why there isn't any drawing for 2-20e at all; it was supposed to show a s1k1psso, which is the same as ssk (despite those who say the tiny difference in tension is important - not in Fair Isle, it isn't, because of the stretching on the knitting board).
In the color section, there are some other oddities. Page 75, Ill 3-16: a sequence supposedly showing three whites, going from cool to warm. The photo shows a sequence from a heathered light blue through a heathered pale tan to a heathered pale yellow.
[Rant over. Please return to your regularly scheduled knitting.]P.S. One not-recently-updated weblog complained that the 1920s socks pattern had nine colors in a row. Um, no. You're supposed to turn the page sideways. (The little words and numbers are a hint.) There are nine colors in all, but there are only two colors per row.
=Tamar