Best crochet books, esp. amigurumi?

April 9, 2023 1:47 PM

Dear Crocheters of Metafilter!! I'm part of a collective that sends books to incarcerated readers; many of our correspondents are part of a crochet group at their facility, and so we get a lot of requests for crochet pattern books. No one in our group is a crafter, so we're not very good at assessing quality/accessibility. We've sent a lot of copies of this book and know it's a hit, but also want to send our crafters something new! We're looking for other books that we can send to our incarcerated crocheters.

Guidelines: under $20, no staples, no spiral binding, available at independent bookstores/bookshop.org. We're in North Carolina so not a ton of call for hats/scarves/blankets, hence the focus on cute little animals. Please share your faves! Bonus points if anyone can link us to a crochet zine we can print ourselves, too! Excited to see y'all's suggestions.

posted by kickingthecrap to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (4 answers total)

Search Press in the UK would be excellent for this - it has lots of "make twenty of these" books. Mandalas, animals, mini birds, cacti, tops, bugs, famous women ... I'm not entirely sure about the exchange rate, but think most of these are under $20. Don't know if they are on the US bookshops.org (it redirects to the UK version for me), but Search Press has a US site. Pretty sure all that I have linked to are bound without staples or spiral binding - certainly the "make 20" series is. All the SP books I have used are well-produced and clear.

The other place to ask is the Ravelry forums, in case you don't know about them. You'd need to create an account, or I'm sure one of the many Rav users here would post for you. (In fact I will link to this question in the MF group over there - it's not very active but some people may see it.)

If you're in need of funds to do this work, Ravelry might be a good place for that too, or I'm sure some MF crafters would be interested in contributing - I certainly would if you can put a link in your profile.
posted by paduasoy at 2:57 PM on April 9, 2023

I have a box of lightly or unused crochet books/ magazines that I would send to you if that’s of interest!
posted by Secretariat at 9:40 PM on April 9, 2023

I've made many of the creatures in this book: Creepy Cute Crochet. It has excellent instructions for beginners with easy patterns to start with as well as some more complicated ones.
posted by machine at 7:33 AM on April 10, 2023

Mod note: Comment removed. Please stick to answering the OP's question. If there's related information you'd like to share with them, MefiMail or email is always an option, thanks.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:25 AM on April 11, 2023