No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting

An historian and lifelong knitter, Anne Macdonald now expertly guides readers on a revealing tour of the history of knitting in America. In No Idle Hands Macdonald considers how the necessity -- and the pleasure -- of knitting has shaped women's lives.

Here is the Colonial woman for whom idleness was a sin and her Victorian counterpart, who enjoyed the pleasure of knitting while visiting with friends; the war wife eager to provide her man with warmth and comfort, and the modern woman busy cre…