Book Review: The Doodle Knit Directory
Back in September this year, I included a short description of Jamie Lomax's The Doodle Knit Directory in the round-up of new fall 2024 knitting books. The book was released on October 8, and now that I've had a chance to flip through it, here's a more in-depth review of said Directory.
What's a Doodle?
Jamie Lomax, originally trained as an interior decorator, has become known for her various doodle patterns: designs that feature small colorwork motifs all centered around a common theme. She's previously released individual doodle patterns, digital chart collections, and doodle decks — small printed cards with colorwork motifs.
The Doodle Knit Directory is her first published book, containing within its covers 200 of these micro charts, some of which have previously been released in card-form. It's one part colorwork stitch dictionary, one part knitting pattern book, and one part guide on how to combine colorwork charts to come up with your own designs. Or, as Lomax puts it: a book on how to not follow a pattern.
The Doodle Knit Directory starts off with an intro that discusses how to use the book, tools and materials you'll need to knit the projects, and how to measure yourself to choose a size in the included patterns.
Planning your own doodle project is a four-stage process and Lomax walks you through them, step by step, from choosing a pattern to picking yarns and planning colors that'll make the colorwork designs stand out. She also offers tips for better colorwork, discussing the importance of color dominance or when and how often to catch floats.
The bulk of the book is made up of the colorwork chart directory and knitting pattern recipes for nine accessories. Concluding the book is a short illustrated section on the essential techniques needed to knit the patterns: cast-on methods, yarn management, basic increases and decreases, and finishing techniques.
5 Themes, 200 Doodles
The doodle directory itself is a collection of 200 Lomax's signature doodles: micro charts of small colorwork motifs. This is where her graphic-design background truly shines through. The doodles are irresistibly cute and full of character, made with a keen eye and a deft hand by adding a stitch here or a pixel there.
The directory is arranged thematically by the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. There are also a few generic geometric designs that can be used as borders, fillers, or accents between larger motifs. The seasonal sections are not color coded, per se, but I'm sensing a common theme here as well. For instance, many of the spring charts are illustrated in soft pastels, winter ones are knit up in cool tones of blues, teals, and purples, and fall-inspired motifs displayed in rich autumnal hues such as oranges, browns and deep reds.
Each colorwork chart is shown, side by side, with its corresponding swatch so that you can see how the motif will look like when knit up. The charts are displayed in grayscale but the swatches are done in lush hand-dyed yarns so they look really inviting. The swatches are also done in yarns with strong value differences: a light neutral background color combined with richly saturated contrast colors. This makes the designs really pop off the page!
All of the doodles fit into 24 stitches. Larger motifs take up the whole space but so-called "half doodles" are 12 stitches wide and some geometric ones even tinier, 4 or 6 stitches. All of them can be seamlessly repeated on a 24-stitch wide chart. Because they're all the same width, the motifs can be easily stacked vertically when coming up with your own combinations. (They're also compatible with the doodle card decks.) 12- and 24-stitch charts are identified in the directory with a small text above the swatch.
The majority of the motifs are designed to be easy to knit even for colorwork beginners. They're made up of just two colors — a background color and a contrasting color — and with relatively short floats. But some of the more complex ones use three colors and even have multi-color rounds. For these Lomax suggests duplicate stitching, if possible, to minimize long floats.
Having said that, some of the charts might look cute on paper but are perhaps not drawn with the knitter in mind. The larger charts, in particular, often have big stretches of negative space which, in the context of colorwork knitting, means long floats. Bigger motifs are frequently surrounded by small filler motifs or individual stitches in the contrasting color to keep floats to a reasonable length, like with the fly agaric mushrooms in the example above.
I can certainly understand the desire to keep the Directory accessible to beginning colorwork knitters. However, clutter-free charts could be made possible with more advanced float-management techniques (such as Ladderback Jacquard, catching floats on the next round, or two-pass knitting) but these are not mentioned in the book.
Recipes for Success
As mentioned, The Doodle Knit Directory also contains knitting patterns for nine different types of small accessories. Lomax calls them "pattern recipes" because they're just the jumping-off point for your own designs. The written instructions are quite bare bones and easily fit onto a single page, two at most. It's the charts and how you combine them what makes each project unique.
The patterns included in the book are:
bottom-up cowl: 5 sizes
sideways infinity cowl: 2 styles, 5 sizes
scarf: 6 sizes
hat: 7 sizes
headband: 7 sizes
mittens with peasant thumb: 4 sizes
fingerless mitts with thumb gusset: 3 sizes
cuff-down DK-weight socks: 4 sizes
cuff-down fingering-weight socks: 6 sizes (3 of which have the same stitch count as the DK socks)
Save for the fingering-weight socks, all other pattern recipes in the book are designed for DK-weight yarn. I don't know about you but I have a lot of sock yarn scraps and not much in heavier weights. Although writing up most of the patterns for DK weight makes yarn options in the book rather limited, Lomax provides helpful formulas for adjusting the patterns for different weights of yarn and offers information on how to modify, adjust, and adapt them for different sizes or styles.
Since 24-stitch increases between sizes make a large difference in DK, some of the patterns in the book are graded at 12-stitch intervals intended for the half-doodle charts. This means that the full-size charts can't be used in all designs or in all sizes, at least not without modification. Although the purpose of the book is that all charts be compatible with each other, ready to be mixed and matched freely, grading some of the sizes at smaller intervals breaks this rule. But it's a compromise that makes it possible to offer a more granular pattern sizing.
All the projects are primarily straight-up tubes in shape: you don't need to increase or decrease in colorwork. If some shaping is needed, that is done in one color only, such as in the hat crown, mitten top, or short-row sock heels. The only exception are the gusset increases for the fingerless mitts: they can be done either in one color or incorporated into the colorwork. However, gusset increases are not photographed or charted — not even for the example pattern! — so the knitter is left to their own devices to figure out how to achieve them.
Samples for each pattern have been knit and photographed in multiple sizes, colors, and combining different doodles. With each pattern you get the specific charts for knitting the example projects exactly as shown in the photos. Like the swatches in the doodle directory, these samples have been knit up in gorgeous hand-dyed yarns in vibrant colors that make you want to grab your needles and rummage through the stash.
All patterns come up with a small schematic and a detailed sizing table. The table includes the intended recipient (such as toddler, child, or adult), size numbers, finished measurements, and required yardage to knit the pattern. The table also includes the approximate number of colorwork rounds needed to reach a certain length so that you can better plan your motifs.
What I found lacking, though, is that the number of horizontal repeats is not included. In fact, it's never mentioned in the written instructions either! This can, of course, be easily calculated from the cast-on stitch count but it's one math step less I could've done without.
Particularly inspiring and helpful were the alternative examples, small illustrations of how the pattern might look in different color combinations and using other motifs than the ones in the sample projects. Full charts are not included but you can find all the individual motifs in the directory if you want to replicate the alternatives.
Make Your Own Magic
While there are knitting patterns in the book, ultimately the aim of The Doodle Knit Directory is to empower knitters to come up with unique combinations, experiment with motifs and play with color. In essence: doodle with knitting.
The book comes with a 24-stitch wide and 60-round long, blank doodle chart (also downloadable and printable for free on Lomax's website) onto which you can start drawing, combining, and assembling your favorite motifs. In a section on working with charts, the author instructs on how to arrange the charts: repeating, mirroring, centering, shifting and off-setting motifs, and adding space or accents between charts to make up visually pleasing designs.
One doodle chart doesn't take much yarn so this is a great book for using up scraps, leftovers, or mini skeins. Lomax writes that one micro chart can be knit with as little as 10 grams of yarn.
In Summary
Jamie Lomax's The Doodle Knit Directory is an inspiring book for all knitters interested in colorwork knitting. The concept of doodling with your knitting encourages improvisation and experimentation rather than rigidly sticking to pattern instructions. It might give you the boost to step out of your comfort zone and combine colors in a way you've not tried before.
The strengths of the book lie with Lomax's ability to draw wonderfully whimsical micro colorwork charts. The 200-motif directory caters to a wide variety of tastes with multitude of tiny charts to choose from, all compatible with her previous work. Clear instructions on how integrate, combine, and assemble these doodles into your own creations makes the book accessible for beginners just jumping into colorwork while still offering a lot of variety for more experienced knitters. Where the Directory falls short, though, is in not offering guidance on some of the more advanced techniques, such as working increases/decreases in colorwork or float management for multi-color charts.
The Doodle Knit Directory is a book into which you'll certainly want to dive again and again. The small accessory patterns offered in the book are simple and quick to knit, making the perfect carte blanche for your own doodle designs. Just the cover photo alone inspired me to knit a fall-themed cowl, and flipping through the pages I keep finding more and more charts I want to incorporate into the knit. At this rate my cowl will be miles long!
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