Crochet Terms

I found this
http://crochet.about.com/od/books/fr/Crochet-Stitch-Dictionary.htm

• "There’s a stitch directory in the front of the book. This directory features small thumbnail-sized photographs of each stitch. The result: you’re able to easily see many stitches and compare them against each other. You only have to thumb through several pages to see them all, rather than looking through the entire dictionary trying to pick which one you want. This feature is a real time-saver. It’s a selling point in favor of this book if you’re only going to buy one stitch dictionary and you’re trying to decide which one it should be.
• Each stitch includes several color photographs, plus information about the stitch, and instructions for the crocheting the stitch – including symbol crochet charts and written text instructions.
• The photography in this book is outstanding. Each photo is crisp, perfectly focused, and at just the right distance to be useful. The photographs are all large enough to be useful.
• The styling in the book is also outstanding. The book includes some stitches where multiple colors are used together, and I found the color combinations to be interesting and inspiring. The beaded and sequined samples catch my eye every time I look at them, and they inspire me to get out my hooks and start crocheting something new.
• Each stitch is crocheted perfectly, precisely and evenly. Since there’s no such thing as a machine with a capability to do these stitches, they must have been crocheted by human hands -- but if I didn’t know better, I’d swear these samples were made by a robot and not a human crocheter. Point being, when you use this book, you have excellent reference material to work from and emulate.

As you have probably already deduced, I’m enthusiastic about this book overall. I think it’s an outstanding publication. Since this is a book review, I’m obligated to look for any downsides that might be present, but I really didn’t find much about this book to criticize. There’s a bit of wasted space in the book here and there, but overall the layout is pleasing. There are some instances of the word “very” that should probably have been edited out of the book. There are a few places where, to my jaded eyes, it seemed as if the visuals tell you everything you need to know, and the writing is merely there to fill space. But, overall, my opinion is that this is a book worthy of a crocheter's (or aspiring crocheter's) time, attention and money.

Important Note: This is not a pattern book. It does not include complete start-to-finish instructions for finished projects you can crochet.

If your goal is to create finished projects – and of course, that probably is at least one of your goals, right? You can decide to use these stitches to create just about any finished projects of your choice. That includes all the popular sorts of projects such as scarves and afghans, or on the other hand, any obscure type of project as well.

However, the book will not tell you specifically how to transform these stitches into finished projects such as hats and slippers and scarves. So, you will have the freedom, the fun, and perhaps also the aggravation, of experimenting to determine those things for yourself.

This is not unique to this particular book; it is the same with every stitch dictionary I have ever owned.

If you are looking for complete project instructions, you’d be better off with a pattern book. I invite you to browse through our list of crochet pattern books to find many possibilities.