Fancy Feet: Traditional Knitting Patterns of Turkey by Anna Zilboorg, published by Lark Books, is a wonderful book for anyone interested in Turkey, history, sock knitting or colorwork.

Anna opens the book with an overview of knitting in Turkey, history, and a thorough explanation of the patterns and the socks. She then provides a generic set of directions for knitting Turkish socks.

Turkish-style socks are made from the toe up, and Anna explains how to start from scratch with your own pattern, if you like. The figure-eight cast on is explained and diagrammed very well, as is the traditional braid stitch used later on in the sock.

My favorite part of the book is when Anna writes, "There is one piece of good news after all this fussy knitting: To be authentically Turkish, you need not weave in all the ends. Just cut them off, and let them hang." That sounds like an invitation to knit complex colorwork, if I ever heard one.

The photographs of socks and other garments throughout the book are lovely, but no explicit patterns, other than the general one, are given.

I think a knitter who is looking to expand his or her color vocabulary would find this book very useful. Anna provides not just the basic shapes on her charts, but also discusses how colors interplay with each other, and why parts of the same sock could use the same pattern in different colors. Variations and options are infinite, and Anna makes it all seem attractive and achievable.