Twenty blanket-and-pillow sets, all charted colorwork, and a promise on the cover that needs a footnote. To her credit, Price supplies most of the footnote herself.
Crochet Retro Blankets in One Week
Savannah Price · Page Street Publishing
| Projects | 40, in 20 sets |
| Chapters | 3 |
| Sizes | Baby, throw, blanket |
| Technique | Bobbin colorwork |
| Craft | Crochet |
| Publisher | Page Street, 2026 |
| ISBN | 979-8-89003-539-4 |
Why this book caught my eye
A blanket book that promises “in one week” is either going to be a great time-management lesson or a setup for disappointment, and I wanted to find out which. Savannah Price, of Savannah’s Stitches, designed all forty projects here herself, and the premise leans into something a lot of us already believe: slow, intentional crafting is worth defending against the throwaway version of home decor. She says so outright in the introduction, framing the book as a response to “this next-day-delivery, quick-buy consumption model that leaves us unsatisfied over and over again.”
What’s inside
Twenty blanket-and-pillow sets, which works out to forty projects, split into three chapters.
Cute and Captivating Creatures
Cats, dogs, sheep, bunnies, whales, lobsters, butterflies.
Flora with a Flair
Daisies, tulips, vines, bees, fruit baskets, tomatoes, lemons.
Dazzling Designs
The rest, including the Kaleidoscope Blanket, which can hit 48 color changes in a single row.
Every blanket comes with a matching pillow, which is a nice built-in bonus for readers who want a coordinated set without designing one themselves. Price also includes real project-management tools, in a section titled exactly that, with formulas for estimating how many hours a given project will take based on your own row or square speed. That is more practical planning help than most pattern books bother with.
While noting there are no industry standards for blanket sizing, the book sorts its blankets into three finished sizes. All three cap one side at 40 inches, and only the other side grows:
- baby, generally under 40 by 40 inches
- throw, under 40 by 50
- blanket, up to 40 by 60
In practice several patterns run larger than their own category, so read the finished measurements on each pattern rather than the category label.
Standout techniques and tips
Every pattern in the book includes a chart, and the colorwork is worked with bobbins, one bobbin per color section, with unused yarn dropped to the back rather than carried across. Carrying yarn is explicitly limited to two patterns, the Whales & Waves Throw and the Squiggle Me This Blanket. This is a natural pairing for this issue’s crochet chart article.
One detail worth knowing before you start, because it surprised me: the blankets are not always one stitch per pixel. Some chart pixels are two stitches wide, so a chart that is 46 pixels wide becomes a 92-stitch repeat. Price explains this clearly in every pattern, but it is easy to skim past and it changes how you read the chart.
Price sorts her patterns into three construction types, row-by-row, patchwork, and a combination of both, and is upfront about the tradeoffs of each.
- Row-by-row means almost nothing left to finish at the end but lots of bobbins in every row, and a project that gets awkward to transport and flip.
- Patchwork travels well and gives you the satisfaction of finishing a square in under an hour, but leaves you with seaming, a border, and a lot of ends.
- The combination method splits the blanket into three columns worked row-by-row, then seams them.
That is a more honest breakdown of charted colorwork than most books offer.
Do the visuals hold up?
Photography is by Magda Lukas, and the settings run heavily to outdoors and natural light. In a book where every pattern is charted, though, the charts are as much the visuals as the photographs, and they are where the book asks the most of you.
The charts do most of the teaching
The instruction style is the thing to know going in. Every project ships with a full chart, but the written row-by-row instructions only cover the first two or three rows.
After that, Price hands you back to the chart with a line like “now you’re hopefully understanding the rhythm of the pattern,” plus a note on reading odd rows right to left and even rows left to right.
The next written row in the Cat Nap Blanket after Row 2 is Row 149. That is a reasonable choice for a book on colorwork, and the setup rows are well explained, but a reader who expected a written translation of every row will not find one.
New to charted colorwork? Sit with A Guide to Bobbins on page 23 before starting a five-color project like the Cat Nap Blanket, let alone the Kaleidoscope Blanket.
What could be better
The one week framing needs to be explained up front
To her credit, Price explains this herself later in the text. She says the five baby blankets take three or four days and the nine throws take five or six days. The six blanket-size patterns are “more of a challenge to complete within a week, but they’re still more than doable.”
What carries the whole promise is the phrase “days full of crocheting.” Her own worked example of the estimating formula lands at just over 27 hours, and she suggests planning 35 to be comfortable. That is a real week of real hours and not a week of just evenings.
Readers who work full time should scale accordingly. I would rather the book said that plainly on the cover flap than left the arithmetic for page 11.
Final verdict
A strong pick for anyone who wants to try charted colorwork without committing to a single giant project. The range from baby size through throw to full blanket size means you can start small.
Price flags more than one pattern as a beginner starting place, not just a token one. Beginners are genuinely served here, more so than a lot of “beginner-friendly” labels turn out to mean.
Buy it if you
- Want to try charted colorwork at a size you can finish
- Like the idea of a matched blanket and pillow set
- Want real tools for estimating project time
- Are a beginner looking for a real place to start
Maybe not if you
- Expect every row written out rather than charted
- Read “one week” as a week of evenings after work
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