Book Review – 100 Bright and Colourful Granny Squares…

I was contacted by the team at ‘Love Crafts‘ before Christmas and asked if I’d like to do a product review. Love Crafts is a huge website which offers yarns, accessories, products, patterns, community and inspiration for all kinds of crafts including crochet, knitting and sewing! There’s loads to discover so do have a look…

www.lovecrafts.com

I always love a book so agreed to do a book review and the one which caught my eye was ‘100 Bright and Colourful Granny Squares‘ by Leonie Morgan

So I was sent a copy and here’s my review…First impressions are that it really is colourful! 🙂 Lots of variations and there are some gorgeous squares. I love that they can be mixed and matched to create amazing blankets, cushions and endless projects… there are plenty of suggestions for this in the book… 🙂

The patterns are written in UK crochet terminology and there’s a really helpful patten chart for each square if you prefer to follow patterns in this format…

To really test the patterns some squares needed to be made and I was of course immediately drawn to the square called ‘Baltic Sea’…

I enjoyed crocheting it very much! 🙂 But for those of you who read my previous blog post you’ll know my hooks have been super busy recently and I didn’t have time to make too many more. So what better way to test the book than to ask others including beginners!

So my daughter crocheted a square… a twist on the traditional granny square with taller stitches. She found the pattern easy to follow…

I used the book during a 1-1 crochet lesson with lovely Lindsay who I’ve been enjoying teaching… this was a real test for the pattern! It worked really well using the book in this way… a small project which could be achieved in a short amount of time and it taught pattern reading too… Lindsay crocheted it beautifully!

Then I asked the ladies at my local crochet group to crochet a square – they sent me these photos of their progress…

Thank you Liz and Justine! 🙂

They both did say that it was harder than they thought it would be… so there are obviously a mix of easy designs and more challenging ones in the book. And of course each different crochet book will have its own style of pattern writing which can take a little getting used to if you’re used to other styles.

I wanted to try one more square myself so decided on the ‘She Sells Seashells’ square – another coastal inspired square!

I liked that it’s a square crocheted in rows rather than in the round. There are quite a few of these in the book…

Again, I enjoyed crocheting it and I found the pattern well written and easy to follow. There are suggestions in the book for edgings and how to join the squares, plus a guide on how to read the pattens and charts as well as a couple of pages on ‘Working with Colour’.

It’s a lovely book which I can certainly recommend! 🙂

Happy Crocheting Everyone… 🙂 🙂