Lovely ideas for great projects but the directions leave something wanting. ( )

I've borrowed this book from a friend and made the kittens in baskets quilt (it's extremely cute, and won a first prize at the fair), and currently have it out from the library with plans to knit the baby sweater with owls in contrasting colour cable. I also have my eye on the crocheted Babar puppets and some of the other knit designs - and the smocking. I can't give the book an extremely high star rating, though, because the many cross stitch patterns are some of the worst-presented that I have ever seen. One of them, an extremely complicated and many-hued picture, you're expected to work from a photo that is printed catty-wompus on the page; most of the rest are graphed, but the graph squares are coloured in solid so you're left guessing how many stitches are in a block of solid dark grey on the Chessie kitten. If the book had been printed in 1970 there might be some excuse for this, but by 1991 the cross-stitch fad was at its height and people knew how to produce a cross stitch graph if they wanted to take the trouble. ( )