Customer Reviews

Friendship Bands: * Braiding * Weaving * Knotting

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Clear writing and a careful, useable system of multicolored diagrammatic notation make this a really good book for the more complicated designs in friendship bracelet knotting. It also covers circular beaded peyote stitch, braided bracelets, and hair wraps. Pretty and useful pictures, too. I think a knotting-savvy, motivated ten- or twelve-year old would enjoy it, but I wouldn't use it as a substitute for a simpler introduction like Gryski's. Get them both.

This a good book for beginners who want to learn how to braid or bead. And also good for the more experienced who want to learn different types/styles of beading and braiding!!

This book was a very good source of information for me being an advanced bracelet maker. The only down side was that the instructions were hard to follow.

This book is great it has great instructions to follow and beautiful designs. It has from beads to threads, by far is the best book I've seen on how to make friendship bracelets. I'm a 15 year old girl and I've been making this bracelts for a long time now and this book has help me devoped new techniques on how to make this braceltes. I would definetly recommended to everyone!!!!

I think this book has some of the most beautiful bracelet designs. It has a variety of styles suited for different materials (like beads, floss, ribbon, or leather), and the format of the book is well laid out. The book makes an attempt to service beginners by having very clear diagrams of the basic knots at the beginning of the book. However, that clear diagramming style quickly disappears.

My main concern with the book is that the bracelet diagrams are hard to understand. The style is fairly abstract. Basically on some designs (the more traditional double knot embroidery floss bracelets) they use colored rectangles to represent the strings you are using. Below the rectangles are a series of abstract arrow-like symbols that are supposed to tell you what to do next and then below that is another series of rectangles showing you how your strings should line up afterwards and so on. (On other designs like for bead bracelets the diagrams were different, but just as abstract.)

Maybe They were trying to save trees because even the most complex 18-strand design takes up about a page. I found their system especially confusing when you want to use strings that are different colors from the model. I feel I am a fairly advanced bracelet maker and I was able to figure out how to make the designs from a combination of looking at the diagrams and looking at the color photos of the finished product. (All projects have a prominent color photo of the finished thing which I found to be nice). I am sure there are some beginners that could figure out this book, but I feel that there are others that would struggle with the abstract diagramming.

If you think you can handle the obscure instructions, this is a good book with beautiful designs. If you think you might need a book that will hold your hand a bit more, this is not the book for you.

I've read many bead books and this is without a doubt the most confusing with its poorly written instructions. For one thing the authors apparently think that seed beads are "indian beads"or "Native American" beads because that's what they call them. What does this even mean,it's beyond ridiculous it's plain stupid terminology. Daisy chains are called "blossom chains" for no reason. The graphs at first glance seem simple until you actually attempt to do the project then you realize it's unclear and confusing. Your actually better off eyeballing the pattern and freeforming rather than wasting your energy deciphering these patterns. Don't be fooled by the pretty pictures.There is better information for free on the internet how to sites.