Weekend Review: Craft Your Cure

Craft Your Cure / Gemma Longworth 
London: Watkins, c2025.
184 p.

This is a cute book I picked up at the library recently. It's a collection of fairly simple craft projects that are all aimed at crafting and upcycling to raise the spirits. It's a cheerful book, full of bright, light colours and photos, with projects which will be accessible to people with very little experience with the various crafts included. I thought it had a really nice balance of types of crafts, and ones that will appeal to beginners and more accomplished crafters alike. 

As claimed on the cover, there are 25 projects shared. They range from arm knitting to decoupage to origami and some fabric crafts too -- affirmation banners with iron on words, decorative embroidery/mending, making a lampshade or a bag from fabric scraps, cushions from old shirts, button jewellery and more. There are essentially three sections; after an intro (which includes a project to make a vision board, very timely this time of year) she breaks the projects up into Healing, Memories, and Mending. There are many paper crafts like collage and origami, sketching, clay work, some chunky knitting, a few decoupage ideas, some stencilling, kintsugi, and the previously mentioned fabric crafts. It's a really nice mix and I think that most people could find at least one or two things to try out here. The projects are simple, most could be done in a day, and are straightforward enough for beginners. 

I really liked the layout of this book - both the photos, which are bright and engaging, and the instructions, which are clear and thorough. I also liked the layout and the progression of the book. The writing style feels welcoming and there is a bit of story with most of the projects, too. I think it lives up to the title; the idea of craft as self-care/cure is strong throughout the book, both in difficulty levels of the crafts included and the additional notes by the author in the intros to each. It was a nice read, and made me feel calm just reading it, before I even tried any of the projects! Well done.