“350+ Crochet Tips, Techniques, and Trade Secrets” — Book Review

350+ Crochet Tips, Techniques, and Trade Secrets is my latest read I’d like to share with you. I received this book for Christmas last year, and have been reading it throughout the year. This isn’t the type of book you need to read cover-to-cover, but I did because I didn’t want to miss any good crochet tips.

It seems to me that one’s opinion of a collection of tips will relate directly to how much of the information one already knows. Some sections didn’t interest me at all, but I’ll be referencing other sections often. So, what kinds of tips are these? Teach me these techniques. Let’s trade in secrets!

NOTE: I am not affiliated with this author/publisher, and none of the links in this review are affiliate links. This means I am not compensated in any way for this review, nor do I earn a commission if you click on a link to make a purchase.

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350+ Crochet Tips, Techniques, and Trade Secrets: How to be better at what you do

Aimed at all levels, this book shares over 300 expert fixes, tips, and insider secrets that will enable any crafter to achieve great results every time.

“About this book,” page 8

Crochet Tips Galore

This book strikes a good balance between beginner, intermediate and advanced crochet tips. I’m in the camp that believes anyone can try any project (or tip) regardless of experience, if they have the patience to figure it out. A lot of patience. So there are “advanced” tips in here that beginners can use, and “beginner” tips that people who’ve been crocheting a long time can still appreciate.

There are seven color-coded chapters:

The introduction gives brief summaries of each chapter, and then shows a few pages to point out features of the book’s layout.

Helpful Features

The highlighted features include:

• Fix it panels. These sidebar sections give you ideas for fixing problems, or give you pointers for avoiding common mistakes.
• Try it panels. Also residing in the sidebar, these sections encourage experimentation.
• Step-by-step sequences. These are “…presented in the number of stages needed to work a given piece of crochet” (9). In my estimation, these “step-by-step sequences” vary in their level of detail. Some of the instructions are totally complete, while others leave gaps between steps. I’ll return to this point shortly.
• Completed swatches & Stitch patterns. My favorite part of any crochet book is looking at the swatches! This tome passes the swatch test.
• Resources. This is your typical list of size charts, stitch symbols, yarn weight categories, etc. It includes standard laundering symbols, which I think is neat because not every crochet book has that.
• Fold-out flap. This is an example of how the book is aimed at all levels. If you fold out the last page, you can view a list of crochet-related abbreviations as you’re reading. If you know the abbreviations by heart, no need to fold out the flap.

Depth vs. Width of Information

It’s helpful to remember this is a book of tips, and it isn’t a how-to-crochet book. Nor does it contain full patterns. I say this because there are instances where a tip won’t provide enough information to complete a certain task from start to finish. (This is what I was talking about when I said there are gaps in some instructions.) I don’t believe these gaps are oversights, but the result of not being able to cover every little detail in a 158-page volume. That’s okay. I’ll give you an example.

Tips #267-#275 deal with crocheting socks:

These tips cover ways socks are constructed and teach sock vocabulary, but they can’t show you how to actually make socks. However, using these tips, you can get an idea of what type of sock pattern you’d like to look for, or how you could set about making your own pattern. Do you want to try a sock with a short-rowed heel or a sock with a heel flap and gusset? Without tip #273, I’d have no clue what that meant. Now I can make a more educated pattern selection when I want to make socks, and I can reference these tips if I run into trouble.

There are multiple tips (including the “step-by-step sequences”) that give you just enough information to guide you on your way. That’s why beginners can absolutely benefit from reading this book, as long as there’s no expectation of extremely detailed start-to-finish answers. That’s my opinion, which is subjective.

The author had to make choices about when to dive deeper and when to stay brief. Here is an example of a “basic” crochet tip that is useful because it adds more information than most resources do. The author wants you to understand turning chains.

Instead of just handing you a chart (single crochet = 1 chain, half doubt crochet = 2 chains…), the meat of the tip consists in explaining why and how it works.

Specialized Vocabulary

One of the things I appreciate most about this book is the vocabulary it teaches. For instance, I knew how to do an external decrease vs an internal decrease before, but I didn’t know those terms to describe what I was doing. Now I do!

Sometimes, the book cleared up terms that I thought I knew but didn’t really. This statement blew my mind:

Edge treatments differ from crochet edgings and borders (page 102) in the way that they are worked. An edge treatment is worked directly into the crochet fabric, whereas an edging or border is worked separately and then attached to the finished piece.

Page 100

I would’ve called all three of those things “borders.” However, here’s a small complaint. If you turn to page 102, it defines edgings but it doesn’t say how edgings differ from borders (if they do). It mentions edgings, trims, and insertions. I use that as an example to say that I didn’t know anything about those words, and now I want to know much more.

The book makes a distinction between a “finger wrap” and a “magic circle” to begin working in the round (107), and this made me question both the book and the crochet community at large. I’m pretty sure many of us refer to this book’s finger wrap as a magic circle, and what this book calls a magic circle is something new to me. (And here I thought I was doing magic circles all along…) Huh.

My Small Gripes

There are some tips in here that I believe are debatably not actually tips. For instance, tips #1-6 list different types of crochet hooks. I suppose this is mandatory crochet book information, but are they tips? (I’m just being picky here. Maybe they are to the complete beginner.)

That’s how I feel about the whole first chapter, which contains tips #1-46 and is least interesting to me. I thought it was a strange choice to include a fairly comprehensive sewing pattern as tip #17, so you can sew your own roll-up hook case. In my biased opinion, I would much rather have had more crochet tips on those two pages instead of a sewing pattern.

The “Fun with color” chapter includes a six-page section on setting up a dye studio: “When you cannot find exactly the color of yarn you want, try some home dyeing” (136). I think this is interesting, but I don’t think it’s exactly about crochet… This section is one of the ones that contains a lot of tips that point you in the right direction but don’t tell you every little thing you need to know. (Meaning, you would need to look up how to dye yarn if you wanted to do it yourself.) So, I’d say those six pages could’ve been condensed into one or two pages about the dyeing possibilities out there. Again, it is related to crochet but… I’m not interested.

These small gripes didn’t keep me from enjoying and learning from this book.

My Bottom-line Opinion

My bottom-line opinion: this book is a great resource I’d recommend. I agree that it’s helpful for all skill levels, and that the crochet tips are useful for any number of projects.

In general, most of the tips are detailed enough for me, but your mileage will vary based on your interests. For instance, now I need to find more garment-specific information to answer my garment questions, but I’m okay with that. The book’s best strength is the vocabulary it teaches throughout, which will help me be specific about my selection of patterns and further reading.

Most of my gripes stem from the fact that I would personally prefer a crochet book strictly about crocheting (not dyeing yarn, or sewing a hook holder). I don’t hate that information; I’m just not interested in it. Again, the rest of the book is more than useful enough to compensate for any part I’m not interested in. I also think that’s a sign that the book should appeal to a broad number of people with different interests within crochet.

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Work Cited

Eaton, Jan. 350+ Crochet Tips, Techniques, and Trade Secrets. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017.