Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

I have a lot of art and craft books. While I enjoy sharing and reviewing my crochet books with the world, the rest of the books are just sitting on their shelves being wonderful. I thought I might start sharing a favorite page or two from each book. Perhaps you will find something to spark your own imagination.

This week, I’ve pulled photographer David Ellwand’s Fairie-ality Style: A Sourcebook of Inspirations from Nature to show you. It’s full of wonderful pictures of nature, fey clothing, tiny furniture, and other items made from flowers and leaves and odd bits of nature. These are all beautiful and inspiring. There is enough inspiration in this book for easily a year of crochet projects. My favorite parts are the color palettes based on flowers, leaves, nests, waterfalls, and toads. Yes, toads.

Behold the glory of this toad! He is wonderful just as himself, but he contains multitudes of colors! This color palette is warm and comforting and fun. It makes me want to go browsing for yarn until I find the perfect shades to recreate his myriad hues and then make a shawl of flowers in these colors. Or recreate one of the circular graphs from The Book of Circles. Perhaps I could even make my crocheted graph actually represent real data on toads. Perhaps fantastically, as Marianne Moore might suggest, an accounting of “imaginary gardens with real toads living in them”.

Sadly, this book is out of print and exorbitant online. I suggest checking out your local library. They need all the support they can get right now and they have awesome resources beyond books. Though the book collections are pretty great.