Book Review: Ask Erica

Book Review: Ask Erica

Author: Erica Wilson

Date: 1977

Publisher: Scribner

ISBN: 0-684-15296-7

Length: 128 pages

Illustrations: several drawings and charts

Quote: “If you’re a beginner, I hope Ask Erica will become your ‘first reader.’ If you’re an expert, I hope you’ll find some...new angle of vision.”

What people asked Erica about, from the 1960s through the 1990s, was needlework. This book is a collection of her answers.

Ask Erica discusses techniques other than knitting, crochet, and tatting. Wilson studied those too, but in this book the needles have eyes. Topics include Algerian Eyelet stitch, appliqué, backgrounds, back of canvas, backstitch, bargello, bedspreads, blackwork, and so on.

If you’re a complete beginner to all needlework, this book can help you learn the vocabulary and remember the techniques you’ve been shown. It’s not really organized to start you stitching, although a really determined beginner could probably design projects using only the brief explanations in Ask Erica. It’s more of a reference book.

If you’ve done some needlework and would like to learn new techniques you can use to make something more individual and complicated than the kits at the dime store, Ask Erica is for you. No pictures of things other people have made, just diagrams of new methods you can use to make the pictures and textures that suit you.

For stitchers as for knitters and crocheters, actually forming the patterns is much easier than remembering how many of them are available to you and how each one is made. I see Ask Erica as most likely to be helpful to a fairly adept embroiderer and beginning designer. There are prettier coffee-table books on needlework techniques (American Needlework has never had much serious competition) and there are fatter books with more diagrams of fancy stitches, but this one is a purse-sized, even coat-pocket-sized, carry-along book you the needleworker can use to remind yourself exactly how you made that knot or flower-petal effect when you’re ready to make the next one like it.

I’d made samples of most of these types of needlework (not all) before I took the plunge into knitting. If I hadn’t committed my time, money, and storage space to knitting, I would probably still have uses for Ask Erica. If eyed needles fit into your hands the way knitting needles fit into mine, this sturdy, library-bound, carry-around book will serve you well.