I find it depends on the project, how much I can talk or pay attention to other things while doing. It is certainly good for the bit of projects when I'm doing borders or large blocks of colour. However, I quite often end up slightly off patterns and improvising to fix the design. So far it has not usually gone very wrong - especially as people won't generally be comparing the results to the patter, I hope.

I find the interesting thing with audiobooks is the slow place means that I notice things that I don't when reading - especially little background details. (It is also fun because I listen to most of them with my partner and then we end up discussing the books, and having both just heard the same bit it is fresh in both our minds. At the moment we are taking it in turns to pick new books when we want something we don't already have, so he has me listening to the Culture novels by Iain M Banks and Foundation by Isaac Asimov, and I've got him to listen to several Guy Gavriel Kay ones and Swallows and Amazons series.)