Marbled Designs — Patty Schleicher & Mimi Schleicher

Review by Robin H. Ashby

Marbled Designs: A Complete Guide to Fifty-Five Elegant Patterns by Patty and Mimi Schleicher is exactly what it claims to be — comprehensive, systematic, and elegantly presented. Fifty-five patterns is a serious undertaking, and the Schleichers carry it off with admirable consistency. Each pattern is documented with sufficient clarity to be reproduced, and the range covered is genuinely impressive.

The book sits somewhere between a technical manual and a pattern library, and it succeeds at both. For a practitioner building a repertoire, it is an indispensable companion. My one reservation is that the sheer volume of patterns can make the book feel encyclopaedic rather than discursive — but that is a matter of purpose, not quality, and the purpose here is admirably served.