Brighten up your home with 12 inspiring modern crochet projects from popular crafter Lucy Djevdet (@craftingbylucy).

Featuring fresh designs and contemporary textures, this book contains design-led, sustainable projects that will help you ‘make do’ rather than ‘buy new’.

These 12 practical projects, made from a range of contemporary textures including raffia, jute and macramé cord as well as yarn, will spruce up your home and your mood! Fresh, bold and functional, there are homeware patterns for all crochet abilities, and every technique needed is shown clearly step by step.

• Get organized with a stylish and practical hanging fruit basket, created from macramé cord and designed to keep your produce fresh;
• Snuggle up with a cozy blanket and comfy pillow, made with chunky feather stitch for a trendy geometric finish;
• Use sturdy raffia yarn to create on-trend storage baskets in four different sizes – perfect for use in any room of the house;
• Create a decorative doormat using jute twine for a practical, hard-wearing finish;
• Update an old vase with a contemporary cover, create a new shade for an old lamp and transform used tins into colourful hanging herb planters.

For a stunningly textured, multi-craft finish, several of the projects incorporate touches of weaving and macramé, both of which are also clearly explained.

Lucy's stylish designs support a sustainable lifestyle and will inject colour and joy into any home setting.

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An ingenious combination of crochet, macramé, and weaving makes these 12 home projects pop. Known online as @craftingbylucy, UK-based crochet designer Djevdet does into great detail on up-front matters in her first book, with a review of materials and tools, in-depth looks at stitch anatomy and special stitches, and notes about the intricacies of related-to-crochet activities. The dozen unique projects include a raffia lamp shade, a versatile and sturdy jute rug, and a blanket. High-quality color photographs of both individual steps and finished products are included, along with instructions and the usual features, such as skill level, gauge/tension, approximate time needed, and making up. Many of the yarns specified are higher-end, and substitutions may not be readily available. Fans of any of the crafts Djevdet combines here may need to add another hobby to the list!

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In contrast to most crochet handbooks’ focus on clothing or bedding, the projects in this fresh debut guide from Djevdet show how to make a variety of household goods, including a lampshade, a mirror frame, and hanging planters. An overview of crochet fundamentals explains such basic techniques as slip stitches and double crochets, as well as more advanced stitches, such as crab (single crochet stitches worked left to right) and moss (a combination of chain and single crochet stitches). The projects employ numerous fibers and weights. For instance, the feather stitch pillow is made with super bulky acrylic yarn, and the lidded storage baskets require light worsted raffia and cotton. Several incorporate other crafting methods, such as the hanging fruit baskets, which use a macramé cord to join the containers to the wooden ring they dangle from, and the crocheted wall hanging, which involves some weaving. The relatively sparse guidance on macramé and weaving might leave some readers feeling challenged by the projects that use these techniques, but the explanation of how to crochet is comprehensive and the creative designs show that the craft is good for more than scarves and blankets. This stands out amid the crowded field of crochet manuals.

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For those who aspire to create handmade home decor with a contemporary vibe, regular Inside Crochet designer Lucy Djevdet's new book is the perfect starting point. From stylish storage to decorative pieces, each of the 12 designs has a fresh, modern look combined with practicality too.