Review of Mollie Makes

On to the promised review - Mollie Makes. I picked this up at the local Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago. We'd lost power at home and needed a quick outing, so of course, where else would you go but the book store? The magazine is published by Future Publishing. They also do Britain's Cross Stitcher, another favorite (side note - the cool thing about Britain's Cross Stitcher is that they do contemporary cross stitch patterns in fun, bright colors).







Some of the things I loved -
Mollie Makes is full of wonderful photographs! Even the articles I didn't particularly care for had beautiful photography. In my opinion, wonderful photography is what often makes a magazine fun to look through. The magazine is also full of inspiration. The editors took some time and looked through blogs, websites, and pinterest to find the best of the best for inspiration. There are also a few how-to articles. One of them is pictured above - the eggs. The crocheted apple cozies on the front cover are also in there as a how-to article. Even better, all of the pattern pieces are in the back of the magazine, to scale. I love that I don't have to find a copy machine to resize any pieces. That can be one of my biggest pet peeves in the sewing world. That being said, I haven't actually made anything yet, so I'm not sure how good the directions are (although they looked good on the first read-through).

Some of the things I didn't love -
While full of inspiration, Mollie Makes was a little low on the how-tos and articles. There are a lot of interviews with artists in here, and it is so awesome to see how other people work, but there are not so many articles on techniques, or... photography, or... anything else. Even just one article on a new technique that could be adapted for multiple uses. Or some tips on photography. In their defense, I will say there is an article on places to visit (in Spain! Someday...) and an article about beautiful summer parties, with beautiful summer photographs to go along with it. I also have a little bit of trouble with the way it is laid out. It's almost as though someone looked into my random brain and said "this is a good layout!" There seems to be no clear train of thought here. Which I guess isn't necessarily a requirement for a magazine, I just found it to be slightly random in this magazine.

The upshot of all this? I liked it. With an $11.99 price tag, it was a little bit of an investment, but I wasn't disappointed. I will probably re-read it again today, to see if there was anything I missed, and I will definitely pick up the next one. However, I won't subscribe to it yet.

Time to go sew...