Crafts Books

I'm relatively new to crochet, but this book is great! It was easy to follow and the items are easy to create!

This book is fantastic. I am slightly beyond a beginner at crochet and most patterns confuse me. Not these. I quickly whipped up the mother octopus and am now working on the baby penguin. They are too cute. I highly recommend this book and am logged in to see if this author has more.

This is seriously the #1 Amigurumi book, all crocheters should have it in their library! These are the easiest, cutest patterns that I have ever worked with, and the author is awesomely sweet...she will answer any questions!

If you love to crochet quick cute animals and things this is a great book. Amigurumi is my favorite crochet right now and this book is well written and extremely easy to follow. I love this book!

I found out about Amigurumi (crochet toys) from a friend who had bought another book like this. I heard so many good things about this one. All of the toys are based on the same basic shapes, just different colors and "accessories." I am enjoying it though it seems limited. This is a great book for first time amigurumi's. I have ordered two others that are a little more diverse. Amigurumi is very fun to make and can be addicting!!

I am someone who is *sewing impaired* and now thanx mainly to this book I'm a happy beader;o) The instructions are easy to understand and the full color instructional photos make it easy to see how to do each of the steps. It's filled with soooo many beautiful pictures which are inspiring! You'll find projects that are perfect for beginners and other projects (like shown on the cover) that are for the more experienced beaders. Definitely a *MUST HAVE* for your beading library!!;o)

This is an excellent book with great photographs and clear and helpful instructions. It is equally helpful to the beginning or experienced beader. I loved browsing through the photographs getting inspiration for projects of my own! Because this book has two authors with different techniques and ideas they are able to compare the way they do things and make clear that we each have our own way of accomplishing the same task. The way they compared their techniques and approaches was extremely helpful and interesting. This book will inspire anyone to develop their own personal style and try something new.

You will be spellbound by the gorgeous jewelry designs in this groundbreaking book! I bought "The Art of Bead Embroidery" along with "Beading with Cabochons" and I have already taken on a grand design myself even though I am new to 'seed beading'. The gallery photos are irresistable inspiration. These two designers are certainly at the forefront of this beadwork style. I suggest both books will give you tutorials and ideas to keep you beading and getting rave results.

THE ONLY DRAWBACK TO THIS BOOK IS THAT IT INSPIRES YOU TO DO MORE AND MORE BEADWORK, TAKING UP MORE AND MORE TIME. IT'S A BEAUTIFUL, CONSISE BOOK THAT MAKES THE DESIGNS SEEM SIMPLE AND EASY TO DO. IT REALLY MAKES YOU WANT TO BITE OFF MORE THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY CHEW, OR HAVE THE TIME TO CHEW. IT IS REALLY A BOOK FOR PEOPLE WHHO LOVE TO BEAD - LEAVES NOTHING TO BE DESIRED. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT FOR ANYONE WHO LOVES TO BEAD, OR WHO MERELY LOVES TO LOOK AT THE OUTSTANDING PHOTOGRAPHY. BY ALL MEANS, PURCHASE THIS BOOK - TO KEEP OR AS A GIFT.

Even if you never make a project from this book, you will truely feast your eyes on the astounding works of art you will find here. Combine that with really warm and friendly dialog, and I totally loved this book. I have not tried to follow the project directions yet, but they look very nice.

I purchased this book for my father who loves to do painting and other art work as hobbies. The pictures and the descriptions are very good. I recommend this book.

It is realy an art. I guess practice is what makes this rocks look beautiful.
You must love to paint, plus you need talent. At the end the time and effort is worthy. Get this book if you really feel a passion por painting animals in rocks.

Fast shipping. Book smells like mildew.
Lots of good fun with this book.

Love this author. This book is outstanding. Can not wait to get started.

I enjoyed this work from the moment I opened it. This book is not only "pretty," it is actually useful. The illustrations are perfect and uncomplicated. The text is easy to follow. Even someone with minimum artistic tallent, such as myself, can actually creat something quite pretty and eye catching. The author offers step by step instructions which even includes how to choose your rock. She gives examples of quite simple projects (like lady bugs), to more complex projects. I simply cannot see how you could go wrong owning and using this one. It has given me a lot of pleasure. Highly recommend this one!

This was a great book with lots of information about building your own mud oven. It was easy to follow how to build the oven and there was a lot of explaining about how and why every little thing worked.

Great book and easy to read and follow. I built my first 22" over a couple days after reading the book. I'll make my bread for Thanksgiving in the oven!

This is a well written book, nicely illustrated and with a well thought out structure. It covers everything you should need to know on how to build an earth oven. The writing is clear and concise, while still conveying the obvious joy of someone who is genuinely inspired by their subject. I especially liked it because it contains a lot of technical detail illustrated with many examples and not much of the boring, preachy philosophical rambling that you find in so many books on hand building from natural materials. Not that there is anything wrong with philiosophising in its place, but I just wanted a book on how to build an earth oven and this is exactly what I got. I would also recommend, as a companion book, 'The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens' which is a more general and comprehensive book on masonry stoves and baking of bread.

This book is perfect for someone wanting to build an outdoor oven. It address every issue that you may encounter and provides many examples of the various styles and techniques. There are pages that tell you what kinds of materials are best for different applications, how to mix your mud, the various methods for insulating and how to use the completed oven.

I went to a major bookstore looking for information on wood fired ovens and got nothing......the book I bought at Amazon was just what I needed. Maybe next year we will have a wood fired oven in our back yard. Service was good and promt.

I purchased this item for my 12 year old daughter for Christmas. She received other flashy and expensive gifts but this was one of her top favorite gifts!! It is a great outlet source for writing thoughts and feelings while reading others as well.

It is great to have a place to write down all that you are feeling, and it gives you little clues so that you can write down things that you are not even necessarily thinking of at that moment in time.

This book did absolutly nothing for me. Just a boring thing to write in, which I haven't.

Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul: Journal, was one of the most moving books I have read. It's directed towards adolescents, and deals with issues every adolescent girl faces. It's a blend of stories, quotes, poems, and spaces to write your thoughts. This book has many different sections such as: family, love and kindness, learning lessons, and though stuff. My favorite section, however, is "loving yourself". This book gave me a chance to deal with issues and see that I'm not the only girl whom faces such issues. Chicken Soup is a book that I am able to pick up at any time if I need some inspiration on a situation, or some reassurance. Other issues helpful to me were on drinking, self-esteem, eating disorders, and how to deal with my past. The best part about this book is that a lot of it is compiled with texts written by teenage authors. There are spaces for friends to write about you, and spaces for you to express how you feel about certain things. Chicken Soup allowed me to realize I was not the only girl who had experienced some of the feelings that I did. After reading this book I knew I wasn't alone! I do highly reccomend this book to any teenage girl. Adolescence is a hard time to get through, and many girls need inspiration. You do not have to read the book cover to cover; you can pick it up any time and read whatever section you desire.

Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul: Journal, was one of the most moving books I have read. It is directed towards adolescents, and deals with issues every adolescent girl faces. It's a blend of stories, quotes, poems, and spaces to write your thoughts. This book has many different sections such as: family, learning lessons, love and kindness, and tough stuff. My favorite section, however, is "loving yourself". This book gave me a chance to deal with issues and see that I am not the only girl whom faces such issues. Chicken Soup is a book that I am able to pick up and at any time if I need some inspiration, help, or reassurance. Other issues helpful to me were on drinking, self-esteem, eating disorders, and how to deal with my past. Another good part about this book is that a lot of it is compiled with texts written by teenage authors. There are spaces for friends to write about you, and spaces for you to express how you feel on certain issues. Chicken Soup allowed me to realize I was not the only girl who had experienced some of the feelings I did. After reading this book I knew I wasn't alone! I do highly recommend this book to any teenage girl. Adolescence is a hard time to get through, and many girls need inspiration. You do not have to read the book cover to cover; you can pick it up any time and read whatever section you desire.

I've been quilting (self-taught) for 18 months and bought this book about 6 months ago, so I'm not quite a beginner but still have plenty to learn. I use it as a reference work, but unfortunately I have learnt to use it with a pinch of salt. I made the mistake of using one of the tables for calculating how to cut a certain type of triangle. Thankfully I double-checked with a template before cutting my fabric, as the formula given was wrong, although I then had all the trouble of cutting fabric with two sets of markings on it. The formula for calculating the width of binding is also incorrect. I've not checked any of the other formulae, but I'm extremely wary of using them now.

This book has no overall contents section, which is awkward, although there is a contents page for each section at its start. It is divided into the following sections, and the pages are renumbered at the start of each section, e.g. 8-12, which again is an awkward way to do things, although it is useful that the section name is printed in the outside margin of every page.

1. Tools, notions and supplies
2. Fabric and colour
3. Planning pieced blocks
4. Planning the quilt top
5. Cutting
6. Hand piecing
7. Machine piecing
8. Hand and machine applique
9. Assembling the quilt top
10. Basting and backing
11. Hand and machine quilting
12. Binding and finishing
13. Specialty techniques
14. Glossary
15. Index

As you can see, this covers the whole process of traditional quilting fairly well, and as it's a long book, there is plenty in it. There are oodles of nice clear photographs, good headings, diagrams, charts and formulae (which may not be correct!), separate instructions for left-handers where applicable, and spaces at the end of every section where you may write your own notes.

Where techniques are discussed (a few aren't - bargello quilting gets a paragraph saying what it is but no instructions, for instance), they are usually discussed thoroughly. There are usually several ways to do anything in quilting, and a lot of the time this book will describe several options, though not always. For instance, it gives a variety of options for joining multiple pieces to make backing, but only one option (and not the most popular either) for joining two pieces of batting. I'm not wildly happy with the basting instructions generally, though they're certainly useful when used alongside other instructions. I also feel that a lot more space should be given to hand-quilting technique, where only one page is devoted to the all-important quilting running stitch. I can't judge the sections on machine-sewing as I have yet to learn how to use a sewing machine, but as is usual for quilting books, machine-sewing is assumed to be the norm. Where it comes into its own is in giving a lot more information about hand-sewing than most quilting books these days do, and as a hand-sewer I'm extremely grateful for that.

There are very few troubleshooting sections, which is a particular loss in a book which is giving out incorrect formulae: if you follow this book's instructions to the letter, you're going to run into problems. There are definitely gaps. For example, the only method suggested for marking up fabrics is to use templates, when many quilters prefer to calculate the piece sizes and draw them straight onto the fabric using an acrylic ruler (a method that is, in my experience, far more accurate and far quicker). It doesn't even discuss making sure your shapes will fit together the best way possible to use up the minimum fabric (personally I always sketch them out on graph paper first), let alone how to calculate how much fabric to buy.

The most serious omission is that this book is only interested in old-fashioned quilting. If you plan to spend your entire quilting career sticking to traditional geometric patterns based on repeated square blocks, you'll be fine - as long as you don't expect the book to teach you how to make any of these blocks! Some basic units, such as flying geese or a square within a square, are covered, and there are discussions on the grid underlying blocks as well as five pages of pictures of traditional blocks (a couple of which I'd say are wrong), but nowhere does the book walk you through putting together a traditional block. This is unusual in quilting books aimed at beginners, which usually give instructions for a few blocks and indicate the level of difficulty for each. If your only source of quilting instructions is this book, half of the blocks in the gallery will be beyond you, since there is absolutely no information on how to sew more complex blocks depicted such as the Mariner's Compass or Double Wedding Ring. To be honest, an encyclopaedia-style book should really have a much fuller block gallery than this.

If you want to learn how to make art quilts, or how to piece quilt tops that aren't made of geometrical repeating blocks, there isn't a word to help you. Ruth McDowell is a good author to go to there, and there are many books and websites discussing more unusual techniques.

I've reluctantly given this book three stars. There are too many important omissions in this book, and for a book that sets itself up as a start-to-finish bible, readers may be deceived into thinking that it will cover all of their needs. More importantly, some of the information is plain wrong and will wreck a quilt if followed literally, and some of the instructions give rather odd methods while ignoring the most commonly-used ones. If you take all of that with a pinch of salt, and have other quilting books around to fill the gaps, as well as checking techniques before using them on a full quilt, then it is certainly a very useful book to have in your quilting library.

Great book full of very useful information. Only drawback was that I had to get it in paperback with out the spiral spine.

This is a great book: Outstanding illustrations,super ideas, easy to follow directions.
Wish I HAD THIS BOOK TWO YEARS AGO. I bought one for my sister and she loves it.

This is the best book. It gives you lots of info on quilting both hand and machine. With lots of pictures and written info. Good book for the beginner.

A great book for someone getting started in quilt making. Wife has had an earlier copy of this book for some time. This copy was ordered for a Grand Daughter that entered into a new career two years ago, that being a first time young wife dedicated to becoming a profesional Home maker. Am told this book is a step in the right direction.

This book is a must for any crazy quilter. I love the size and the fact that it can lie flat open when using. The drawings are large, clear and easy to follow. Even has directions for left handed. The color photos are wonderful "eye candy". This book sparked so many new ideas for me. It is a MUST HAVE.

This is a must have for every stitcher's library. An excellent stitch guide with wonderful diagrams.

Whether you are a new or experienced stitcher this book gives easy to follow instructions for a wide variety of stitches along with ideas to combine different stitches. I have referred to it many, many times on my current project: a crazy quilt. Money well spent!

The instructions were easy to follow and well illustrated. I am a novice at embriodery and this book was very helpful. It gave me ideas on how to proceed in my crazy quilt.

Bought the book as a gift. Recipient was very pleased with the book. It clearly describes the stitches and how to make them. Full of pictures that enable you to visualize the final result and the process of creating those stitches.

Exploring the TITANIC is a very profound read. Robert Ballard (author of this book) is an avid diver, with the dream of finding and exploring the TITANIC. He joined a bunch of French explorers, and traveled far into the deep of the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland where the TITANIC sank in 1912. Ballard used Argo (an advanced water-safe camera) to take pictures of the TITANIC until he found that he could not use Argo anymore because the rough waves were pounding against it. Minute after minute, hour after hour, the Knorr (the submarine Ballard was traveling on) floated in a sea of darkness because the only light they had was the light from Argo. About ten hours went by before Ballard decided to use Angus. Angus was an older camera that Ballard had used in previous explorations. In an hour or two, Ballard had found the TITANIC. Somehow he was not satisfied. He wanted to take clear pictures but did not know how to get them with the technology that he had with him. He pondered this for days. He knew that he was about 13 feet above the TITANIC. Then it came to him that he just needed to go down 13 feet more to get his pictures. Ballard convinced the Captain to go down the 13 feet. When they reached their target, they were able to get their pictures.
Ballard's dream was still not fulfilled because he had not yet explored the TITANIC. About a year later, Ballard and two other divers went underwater to explore the TITANIC. They had traveled down four or five times to complete their mission of exploring the TITANIC. Ballard's dream was fulfilled.
I would recommend this book to any reader that is NOT sensitive. This book told about people on the TITANIC who died. I think the author told us too much about people's lives and made us care about them too much. It was sad when you found out the person died. If they weren't killed, then one of the person's loved ones was killed. For example, Jack Thayer was talked about very much in the beginning. I became fond of him because the author gave so much detail about his life. When Ballard told us that Thayer had survived the crash, he did not stop there. He went on to tell us that Jack's father and his friend did not make it. This made me very emotional. If you would like to learn about Robert Ballard and his exploration of the TITANIC, then by all means, read this book. If the sad parts about the people who died bother you, just skip those pages and you'll still learn a lot about exploring the TITANIC.

I first read this book almost 15 years ago, at age 5 : I loved it, and read it uncountable times. Today it is still just as fascinating. Beautifully illustrated and clearly written, it was the first of many Ballard books that I read. I would also recommend the Discovery of the Bismark and The Wreck of the Isis, just as interesting but less well known. A great way to start reading about the great ships of the past.

Goes behind the Titanic. Why did the Titanic sank, why it was built, how they came up with the name Titanic etc. It has everything you need to know about the Titanic. Even has real actual pictures taken of the Titanic in the water and above.

Do you like old ships? Well, I know the right one for you. It is the Titanic. It is about a ship that hit an ice berg and went down. So go under water with Dr.Robert Ballard and explore the Titanic. Good Luck! This book is recommended for 8 and up.

It's a true story about the Titanic and what things Robert Ballard and his team find in the Titanic.

Very informational book on quilting processes. The pictures are helpful and the information is presented well.

Lots of Quick and Easy patterns in this book. Eleanor explains
things so that you can put them together quickly. My copy is a
class book, and my quilt turned out gorgeous. Has hung in my
quilt shop for several months now.

I enjoyed reading this book and learned a few new techniques for building blocks and I have decided to start some of the book's projects as soon as possible.

I have a collection of dozens of quilting books and this has to be the prettiest, most compelling and easiest to follow. I'm on my second quilt from this book and it couldn't be easier. I can't recommend it highly enough.

The instructions of this book are so good that I made the quarter log cabin quilt in just a few days. The illustrations are very helpful.

My 11-year-old daughter spent a happy afternoon making flowers by herself. Several wrong turns and mistakes, but they turned out lovely. She was proud of them, put them in a small glass vase, and they're admired daily. Another ingenious Klutz book.

I decided to save some money for my wedding by making paper flowers instead of using real flowers. I started to research paper flowers and came acruss the Klutz book of Tissue Paper Flowers. I bought it and when I got it, I was so amazed at how easy the flowers are to make. I started out by making one of each flower and was so impressed at how real some of them looked. I can't wait to get white tissue paper to make my wedding flowers! This book has such easy step by step instructions. The only down side is that it shows so many other flowers on the front that aren't actually in the book. However, once you tackle all the flower projects in the book, it is very simple to look at a real flower and figure out how to make it out of tissue paper. These flowers are fun, hard to screw up, and are so pretty! I think doing projects like this with kids would be a lot of fun, too.

I just received this book. I bought it as a birthday gift for an 8 year-old niece. She will love it and so will her 5 year-old sister. In fact, their mother will love making the flowers too. I can see this being a great book for all ages because you can customize the flowers according to your skill level ie. more detail for older kids and simpler designs for younger kids.

It looks fun. I see projects in the book showing how to use them on wreaths, hats, headbands, etc. The book is colorful and the directions look clear. The book looks like it will last too. The back cover is thick chipboard and all of the book pages are thick paper. I am impressed!

Like many of the other reviewers, I am a grown-up who bought this book to share with children and ended up enjoying it tremendously as a craft project for myself. This book is so beautifully designed with clear easy-to-follow directions and plenty of supplies to get you started. I think it would make a great gift for children as young as age five all the way up to the most crafty adult crafter.

a very fun craft project. my kids have spent hours with this one. the patterns are fairly easy for kids, and a few need adult help. i recommend this craft.