Ondori, Keito Dama, Nihon Vogue, Let’s Knit Series… These names sound familiar? Are you in love with Japanese pattern books just like me and depressed that they are so hard to find? Then giftjap.info is the site you’re looking for.

Here’s a screen shot of the site:

The site holds a huge archive of scans of different Japanese magazines and pattern books. Name it they have it: knitting, crochet, beading, amigurumi, sewing, embroidery, patchwork, basketweaving, fashion magazines, nail art, home deco, cooking, origami, etc.

All you  need to do is learn how to navigate the site (because it’s written in Russian, I think) and you’re okay. Oh and you should have a software that can open .rar files such as WinRar or 7-zip, both of which are FOSS (free and open source software).

Here are some of the pattern books found on the site:

I’ve written a short tutorial on how to navigate the site:

Demistifying the navigation bar

Click on the tab to display all the magazines/books in that category. You will get a lot of results. Clicking on the bigger tabs will display ALL the books in that particular category. If you click CROCHET, it will display all books in crochet and knitting (don’t know why they’re joined together).

Clicking on the links below the big tabs, however, does not narrow the results. It displays all the books under that category, just like the big tabs. For example, clicking on the Apparel link displays all books for clothing whether it be crochet, knitting or sewing.

The site does not support searching its archives so I advise you to visit this site if you have a lot of spare time.

Back in the tutorial, Downloading a Book

Once you have found a book you want to download, you should click the “More Details” link found beside the titles and details of the book.

This would bring you to a page with more details about the book including some of the pages found in the book and the DOWNLOAD links which are written in English! Hooray!

There’s a box for the comments, if you would want to leave a comment and below it are pictures of pages from other books you might like!

Hope you enjoy this site as much as I do!

P.S. REAL BOOKS ARE BETTER THAN EBOOKS. If you have the means to buy these books , please buy it. Let us support the designers of these books and their publishers so that they can continue to publish these books that we love.