MDK Field Guide No. 11: Wanderlust
MDK Field Guide No. 11: Wanderlust
The essential introduction to one of knitting’s greatest pleasures: the handknit sock. From the master of mix-and-match design, Wendy Bernard, comes all you need to knit beautiful socks. With this little book and a skein of delicious yarn, you’re set for knitterly adventure.
Consider this the only book of sock patterns you’ll ever need. After making more than 100 pairs, Wendy Bernard knows a ton about the construction of socks—and she knows what we don’t need to know, as we begin our sock-making adventure.
Like a sculptor honing away all the excess, she distills her deep knowledge into everything you need to know, and nothing that you don’t.
These are sock designs that let you begin at the toe or the cuff. You can work a pattern all over the sock, in a panel down the front, or—our favorite when the yarn is wild—a perfectly simple stockinette sock.
Toe-up or cuff-down, with a baker’s dozen of stitch patterns that will give you plenty of beautiful, distinctive designs for every mile of your journey.
The 13 stitch patterns are all modern, clever, and add a little zing to your sock making. You will be dazzled and astonished at how a few simple knits and purls will create beautiful textures that are perfect for socks.
Sock knitters know that socks tend to beget more socks. The more you make, the more ideas you have for the next pair. This Field Guide makes it incredibly easy to scheme up your next pair of socks—even as you crank away on your current pair.
Nothing fussy, nothing hard—Field Guide No. 11: Wanderlust is portable joy to take with you on whatever journey you have planned.
There's a bit of a back story to the name of these guides...
The two American women, Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne, who produce these guides run a company now known as Modern Daily Knitting, but up until a month ago the company was called Mason-Dixon Knitting. Ann and Kay were originally pen pals living in Nashville and New York respectively. They chose the name, it seems, to reflect that fact that one lived in the south and the other in the north of the USA.
I confess when I first ordered these guides in June 2020, just after they had changed the company name, I didn't realise the significance of the original name. But comments I saw online made me do a bit of homework. From Wikipedia I discovered that:
The Mason–Dixon line is a demarcation line between four U.S. states, forming part of the borders of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia (part of Virginia until 1863). It was surveyed between 1763 and 1767 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in the resolution of a border dispute involving Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware in Colonial America. It later became informally known as the border between the free (Northern) states and the slave (Southern) states. The Virginia portion was the northern border of the Confederacy. It came into use during the debate around the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when the boundary between slave and free states was an issue. It is still used today in the figurative sense of a line that separates the North and South politically and socially.
Having read this, I can understand the impetus for change and appreciate their choosing to act on it. My stock, however, was printed before the change took place and still carries the old company name. I have added this explanation to the website so that customers are aware of the situation.