Lydia and I both love to read and a few years ago, we started posting our yarn projects along the books we were reading on Instagram. It was not all the time and it could be pretty random; a book we wanted to talk about along with a yarn project we wanted to showcase.
I’m not sure why we stopped doing it but I thought it could be nice to come back to it by talking about a book we love and pairing it with knitting or yarn.
It doesn’t have set rules and it doesn’t have to be a project we knitted but more something we would imagine a character wearing.
Why we chose The Goblin Emperor for our first Yarn& Book Pairing Edition
For this first edition of our Yarn and Book pairing, I decided to go with The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison.
I love this book and have been it rereading several times for the sense of comfort it brings. It’s the quiet kind of fantasy, with court intrigues and a young Goblin who suddenly became emperor and must learn how to survive in this Elfish court where he doesn’t seem to have any allies.
This book suddenly became a series last year when a follow-up about a secondary character was released and even if I missed our Goblin Emperor, Maia, I really enjoyed this new story and was overjoyed when I learned another book was scheduled to realise this month.
You can actually find a short story about Thara, the main character from The Witness for the Dead and The Grief of the Stones, called Min Zenerin’s plan . There is no spoilers for any of the books but it’ll give you a taste of the writing and the characters. And if you’re familiar with this character already, you should definitely enjoy it too!
Which Yarn and Patterns could be paired with The Goblin Emperor?
During my last reread of The Goblin Emperor, a couple month ago, I was thinking of the woollies Maia would enjoy. In the book, he is confined by the etiquette of the Elvish court that forces him to wear white silk as the Emperor. He is, understandably, tired of all this impractical white and the way it doesn’t flatter his skin tone.
His mother being a Goblin princess who died young (grief is a huge part of the book), I immediately thought he would love a comfy shawl in private, in a more rustic style to remind him of the comfort he had as a child and contrast with an imperial court where he always has to fit the emperor image in public
So for this Yarn and Book Pairing for the Goblin Emperor, I really imagined a rustic wool, warm and dyed with plants that he could reach for and wrap around his shoulders.
The designers that came to mind when I thought folklore and fantasy rustic wool patterns were Melody Hoffman and Tania Barley.
If you have designers in mind for woolly fantasy inspired knits, then please tell us all about it! We definitely more of those!
I read The Goblin Emperor so many times, Lydia finally put it on her e-reader and we named a moody colorway after Maia, The Goblin Emperor of an Elvish and Goblin court where tensions are running high.
You can find the Goblin Emperor colorway on our Yak Knight fingering weight base (yeah, some Maia’s socks!).
Did you read The Goblin Emperor? Are you as excited as me for the new release making it a three (3!!) books series?
