The granite I want is much more expensive than what I was planning to spend orginally. However if I only buy one slab the additional expense is not that bad. I also figured out that I only need one slab to cover the square footage required, and this could be done with just one seam at the sink, and I'd still have some granite to spare. Buying two slabs to book match my counter seems extravagant to me.

As a side note, I was curious to hear if people have put their seams at the sink. My kitchen designer commented to me yesterday that fabricators are not doing it that way any more.

For perimeter counter it is not necessary. If you have a good fabricator, they will be able to template your countertop with the seam in an unobtrusive area, usually near a corner, if applicable and template it so that it matches. Good luck!

We had to purchase two slabs and they were not bookmatched. Here's some info about bookmatching on the Granite Gurus website that might be helpful for you.

My fabricator is all about bookmatching, but laments the fact that mony stoneyards have a dearth of bookmatched slabs; I've talked to some stoneyard employees who didn't even know what bookmatching was.

So, IMHO it's great if you can bookmatch--especially on a large island like Clarygrace said-- but definitely not necessary and perfectly fine to simply have the grains going the same way.

Since bookmatching is only possible if the guys doing the cutting and polishing were savvy enough to polish alternating sides, many people don't even have the option.

My fabricator is all about bookmatching, but laments the fact that mony stoneyards have a dearth of bookmatched slabs; I've talked to some stoneyard employees who didn't even know what bookmatching was.

The other issue that will arise, and it's a BIG one, is the ability of a fabricator to do the seam well enough. This is where it's important to see past work and to not choose the lowest bid just because they are the lowest bid.

Check out this disaster of a counter here:

These people tried to save money by just sticking the ends of a slab together. Unfortunately, the fabricators did not ensure that the veining or pattern went together at all.

Compare this to book matched and the perfect seam here:

While you are likely not going to get a perfect match unless you do book matched, you can get away w/ not doing it if you have a granite that doesn't have very distinctive veining, like so:

If your fabricator is good, you can also do better than my example of a disaster counter, although again, not perfect. This one below is better, for example, because they matched up the big block of color at least. But you can still see veins dying and colors changing in an unnatural way:

Green--I've seen countless blocks of marble, slabs in order, straight from the quarry, sliced like a loaf of bread, with the same (not alternating) side polished.

Could this be a matter of marble versus granite? I mostly spend my time looking at marble in stone yards. I'm just wondering why it sounds like the norm in your experience to have alternating sides polished, and for me it's been the exception to the rule.

My fabricator would love to have his clients shop at your stoneyards!

So, yes, it does matter which granite you are using, but I would say pay the extra for bookmatched.

Seam is compliments of the masterful Joshua from Creative Soaptstone. This was right after install. Now that the counter has been in use for a year I'd have to really really search to find it.

Interestingly enough, the guys are here now to finish the seams. I am not really happy with the seams or the match, but it is what it is.
Here is the same slab seam:

And here is the book matched seam:

Now, you may notice that the veins are very different (color especially) but that is the nature of this stone. So in my case, the book match did not really help. Looks much better than the same stone seam but really would not be on anyone's list of great seam matches.

Our L counter has a sink leg that was longer than the long dimension of the slabs and longer than twice the short dimension. The other leg was longer than the short dimension of the slabs. That means there was no way to lay it out on the slabs so that all seams were bookmatched. (If both legs are no longer than the long dimension of a slab, they can lay it out with a diagonal bookmatched seam in the corner. Our kitchen fabricator doesn't like to do the diagonal seam, but in our case it didn't matter because of the long leg.) The only way to do our counter with only one seam was for the seam to be at the sink or dishwasher. Fabricators seem to be divided on whether a seam at the sink is good or bad, but over the dishwasher is more of an issue because there is no cabinet front for support.

We wanted the seam at the sink because it let us have just one seam and our fabricator preferred that as well. Our granite is 2 cm with a plywood underlay so it is well supported at the sink by the plywood and cabinet.

Our granite is very active, but the grain doesn't have a strong direction - in some areas, it slants across the slab and in others it was pretty swirly. We spent a couple of hours with the fabricator laying out the templates on the slabs. We were doing granite backsplashes and wanted a good match between the counter and backsplash and also had to fit long pieces for our window sill and counter outside the kitchen window. We chose a placement where the two sides of the seam were in a swirly part of the granite. I can see the seam when I look for it, but I don't notice it otherwise even though the color match at the back of the sink isn't perfect.

Recently we had a surround made for a new fireplace from the remnants from our kitchen. The top and one side came from one piece and the other side came from another piece because those were the only remnants long and wide enough.

I think the fabricator did a good job of positioning the pieces on the remnants so that the seams aren't jarring even though the long direction of the top piece was parallel to the long direction of one of the side pieces on the same remnant. BTW, the left and right side pieces came from the same part of the slab on the two slabs that were back to back - you can see that they are close to mirror images of each other around the white smile-shaped mark but the darker area a foot or two below the "smile" shows more differences.

For example, here is one of our slabs with the template for part of our L on the top of part of the slab. The end that will be one side of the seam is on the right (just above the upside down white smile).

Here is the bookmatched slab for that one. You can see that it is a pretty close mirror image of the other slab. For the seam to be bookmatched, the other side of the seam would need to be positioned in the same spot on the mirror image as on the other slab (again just above the upside down smile), but the pieces won't fit that way and the seam is the end of the short bit almost touching the top edge of the slab. (The bottom of that slab is the backsplash for that side of the counter so we have a great grain match on that long very visible area.

When we fabricated our soapstone, I actually uploaded photos of the slabs to my PC, scaled them, and drew little 'box frames' in the sizes I needed with codes showing what pieces joined other pieces where. Part of our backsplash is also soapstone, and by having one extra seam in a plain area of a long counter, we were able to match the major veins in our counter to their adjoining backsplashes, and sometimes even to the upper counter on the dining ledge. We did have two seams at the sink corners, and also at our cooktop cutout -- again, bot very short seams, well reinforced from below. But NO dead-end veins, and all of my favorite veins got feature locations.

It all depends on what size pieces you need and what logical options you have for 'pattern breaks' -- They're probably more flexible than you think.