I'm shocked that five people have given this book five stars (so far) and think they must all be personal friends of the editor or at least not actually tried to use it to accomplish anything. Motif patterns are widely available on the Internet for free. The value of a book like this is as a well-organized at hand reference of the truly unique motifs. This book fails to provide that value in every way.

My first complaint is that this book has absolutely no organizational strategy. The motifs are just jumbled together. You want a square motif? You'll have to hunt through all 250 because they're just scattered in there. Are there any octagons in here? You'll never know until you look through all 250. There's no table of contents by shape or index by shape. Imagine you're trying to choose between two or three circles. You have to flip back and forth among hundreds of pages to compare just a few similar shapes.

Which brings me to complaint number two. By far not most, but more than a few motifs are trivial or are nothing but inner parts of other motifs. My favorite example is "Ringlet" on page 188. It's 21 DCs in a ring. That's it. That's a pattern. The fact is, the reason for complaint #1 is complaint #2. If they grouped everything by shape, they'd be shamed into editing out about 30% of the motifs because they're so redundant.

My third complaint is the diagrams are too small. Diagrams for patterns with 10+ rows get the same size diagram as patterns with just 3 rows. Needless to say, diagrams for larger patterns are not usable without a magnifying glass.

My fourth complaint is the photos of the motifs are all printed at the same actual size, not to scale relative to each other. So the photo of large and complex "Royal Square" is the same size as the previously mentioned "Ringlet". ( )