How I Amuse Myself in Waiting Rooms

In answer to the Long and Short Reviews prompt at 

http://www.longandshortreviews.com/miscellaneous-musings/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-for-February-28-2024/

 

I knit.

 

 (That one's no longer available, but you can order a doll dressed to match any family-friendly book from this web site: $10 for approximately 12" tall adult-or-older-child-type dolls, more for other types of dolls that are more of a challenge and usually take more time and yarn. Knitwear can be designed to fit a doll you supply.)

Book Review: Needlepoint for Everyone

Title: Needlepoint for Everyone

Author: Mary Brooks Picken & Doris White

Date: 1970

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none, but click here to see it on Amazon

Length: 207 pages plus index

Illustrations: photos, mostly black and white, and some charts

Quote: “Needlepoint, which is embroidery on canvas, was a type of needlework highly developed by the English.”

Needlepoint for Everyone gives a few details from the history of needlepoint, but there’s not a great deal of history in this book. Neither is there a great deal of exposition. There are examples of needlepoint found in museums and historic mansions, explanations of techniques, and chapters about specific styles and subjects for needlepoint. There are lots of pictures. Most of them are black and white, but most are clear enough to inspire crafters.

Specific topics discussed in this book include the needlepoint of Blair House (“the Guest White House”), needlepoint in rehabilitation programs, samplers and mottoes, devotionals, needlepoint for children, needlepoint for men, needlepoint in advertising, needlepoint treasures in museums, and needlepoint symbols.

This ambitious, somewhat eccentric book contains far more photographs than charts, but even knitters and weavers—as well as needlepointers and cross-stitches—can find some inspiration in Needlepoint for Everyone.

By looking her up online, I’ve learned that Mary Brooks Picken was quite an interesting character. She died, around age ninety-five, before I became a serious needle crafter. Back in 1916 she had founded the “Women’s Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences.” As what one pattern publisher still calls “the original fashion authority,” she wrote ninety-six books on sewing and textile crafts. Someone looking for fresh material for a Women’s History Month project might want to research her life and work. 

Categories Book, Crafts Tags needlepoint, Washington D.C., women's history 

Book Review: Piecework January 1998

Title: Piecework January 1998

Editor: Linda Ligon

Publisher: Interweave Press

Date: 1998

ISBN: none

Length: 80 pages

Quote: “In this issue, we explore the craft traditions of waterbound places.”

For some of the traditional handcrafts—weaving, embroidery, knitting, quilting, basketry—in some years, in our Machine Age, an industry develops. Shops and magazines are devoted entirely to the crafts that are fashionable enough to support these enterprises. Books are published. Clubs, with conventions and even competitions, are organized. Classes are taught for college credit. Meanwhile, other crafts languish in the shadows and receive little attention until the restless currents of fashion move on in search of something “new.” In the 1970s, when weaving was “in,” knitting was derided. In the 1990s, when knitting boomed, Knitter’s magazine sold widely while its publishers’ other venture, Weaver’s magazine, was never in stores. Meanwhile, does anyone else remember macramé?

Piecework magazine was the production of some people who recognized the deep silliness of these fads. If you really enjoy a craft, you continue wanting to do it whether it’s in or out of fashion. Piecework offered something for everybody. It was not a dabbler’s magazine; the articles were too scholarly and the projects too advanced. (While knitting magazines were bowing to the market for thick yarns that knitted up at 3 stitches to the inch, Piecework continued to print patterns to be knitted with traditional yarns and needles that knitted up at 8 or 9 stitches to the inch…and if you were not a specialist with serious money to spend, good luck finding those yarns.) Piecework was a magazine for serious crafters of all kinds. The magazine didn’t have room to feature every craft every month but they had something for everybody in every year.

So, in this issue, what you’ll see are gorgeous full-color photos of museum pieces and prize winners, an occasional landscape, and an occasional face, from Haiti, Australia, Greece, Guam, Wales, the Faroe Islands, the Maritime Provinces, and Japan. In the same order, the crafts featured are beading (“Sequined Flags of Haiti”), embroidery, weaving/embroidery, basketry, quilting, knitting, rug hooking, and kitemaking. What you’ll find detailed instructions for making are embroidered flower motifs, a “whole-cloth quilt” where the focus is on stitching rather than patching, a knitted shawl, and a hooked rug. Beaders, basket makers, and kite makers will have to draw their inspiration from the pictures.

Because the articles focus on craft history—usually specific stories, as, in this issue, the story of two needle artists who signed up for a twenty-year competition and competed so exclusively against each other that others petitioned to have them dropped from the group—they are evergreen. If you like reading stories about a particular craft, looking at pictures of masterpieces, and at least considering a pattern for something in that general style of your craft, you might happily collect as many as two-thirds of all the Piecework magazines ever printed. Like National Geographic or Birds and Blooms, these magazines would be perfect for waiting rooms.

If you’re more of a specialist, you might want to know: The embroidery is “shadow” embroidery, featuring effects produced by carefully stringing colored floss across sheer white fabric so that the shadow of the floss at the back shows between the stitches at the front. The quilt is worked from an elaborate design of flowers, leaves, and hearts, which you copy onto fabric, first with a pencil and then with matching thread; it’s all about textures, in white or one color. The shawl is worked at 5.5 stitches to the inch in Icelandic lace-weight wool; you could get the same gauge with a pound of Bernat “baby” acrylic yarn, and make a nice shawl for someone who refuses to own wool, but at some time in their lives everyone should get a chance to feel the softness of all-natural wool from a brown, black, or gray sheep. The rug must be made with real wool; the hooking technique used, though certainly easy and fast, relies on wool’s natural tendency to mat to hold the rug together. (Latch hooking would be more reliable, and would allow you to use mixed materials if you really wanted to; it would not be traditional, because the traditional rug hookers were turning bags of rags into something to wipe muddy boots on, so who had time to latch the loops? They had wool fabric; they let it mat together.)

The quality of the eye candy in all issues of Piecework was consistently high. The articles always left people wanting to know more…which was the point. Piecework was the bimonthly magazine of a publishing house that specialized in craft books. If you wanted more information, Linda Ligon could always recommend a book. Most books cited in Piecework were advertised in the same issue of Piecework, and some of those books may still be available in libraries or at specialized craft shops.

Book Review: Knitter's Magazine #90

Title: Knitter’s Magazine #90, Spring 2008

Date: 2008

Publisher: XRX

Length: 104 pages

Illustrations: full-color photos mostly by Alexis Xenakis

Quote: “And in my night dreams, I cover the world in stripes...”

Each of the first hundred issues of Knitter’s had a theme. In this one the theme is color, from preposterous multicolor mixes to simple stripes.

Some people rate the effectiveness of craft magazines by the number of people a magazine inspires to rush out and buy things. On that criterion, knitting magazines that feature multicolor patterns aren’t likely to reach the top. Pattern designers are paid to design around the “novelty” yarns manufacturers offer to only a few specialty shops for only one season. Pattern magazine usually contain a few papers advertising the shops, often just one per State, where Americans can get the novelty yarns shown. The rest of the world may or may not be able to buy anything similar, although Greek-born Alexis Xenakis and British-born Elizabeth Zimmermann worked hard to make Knitter’s international. By the time readers notice a pattern and decide they want the novelty yarn, often the novelty yarn is gone forever.

Nevertheless, experienced knitters have fun with magazines like this one, because we know that we don’t have to have the original novelty yarn to knit a similar effect. We knit from our yarn stashes. In fact, stash knitting may offer more “creative” fun than shopping does.

Consider the garment shown on the cover of this magazine. Basically it’s a camisole with an awkward half-scarf top that won’t fit under a jacket. The model is wearing it as a summertime shirt, presumably next to her skin although real models seldom wear anything next to their actual skin. It’s knitted at 4 stitches to the inch, in a scratchy metallic-blend yarn. Do you know anybody who’d want to wear that kind of heavy, scratchy yarn next to their skin? I don’t. But aha! I happen to have some lightweight yarns in each of the colors that form the stripes in that cover sweater. Knitted together, with one strand of bright jellybean green and one strand of yellow, orange, purple, blue, teal, gold, or brown, and even bits of metallic glitter, the lightweight yarns will form similar shimmering stripes in a blanket that looks as much a treat as that cover sweater. Arguably it’ll be more of a treat for my eyes, since Xenakis photographed a pretty professional model, but I can admire my blanket in the back of their mother’s van, graced by the faces of some of The Nephews!

Does stash knitting offer anything to the knitter without a stash? Of course it does. Go to your local yarn shop and identify yourself. Stash knitters will probably be happy to share. For knitters living in cramped quarters, some yarn shops have been known to organize “stash parties,” where people with overflowing stash bins bring in bags of leftover yarn to share with people who want to try playing with colors and textures...

Need I mention that, although knitting magazines tend to present designs in the form of sweaters, you don’t have to knit them that way? Multicolor designs can be more fun to look at on a simple geometric shape, like a square cushion or rectangular blanket, rather than on a human body. Stripes that go around and around the waist are among the presents nieces least want to receive from aunts; stripes that go around a bag won’t make anyone look fat. A purple sweater with see-through stripes may seem like a bad joke (few human skin tones really harmonize with purple), but a purple scarf with see-through stripes would be fun to wear. You can have tons of fun with the multicolor designs in this magazine even if your family want to wear the sweater shapes knitted in solid black.

I’ve had fun with this magazine over the ten years since a customer bought it for me to make her version of the “Sand Bars” T-shirt sweater on page 72. Since then, this web site has displayed a gorgeous stash-knitted variation on the “Faded Ribbons” sweater, made as a more practical jacket. (The same selection from the same stash also went into the Monet Blanket, now sold.) I’ve also gathered up stash yarns to knit the “Sea Grass” T-shirt sweater, and used the “crown stitch” from the skirt of Rick Mondragon’s preposterous “Royal Cadet” sweater pattern as a band of texture in a blanket. I’ve not found a man who wants to model Ginger Luters’ “Zigzag Bricks” sweater, but the design has been begging me to knit it as a “boyfriend sweater look” for a woman for all these years. If and when I find a good price on yarns that knit up to 6.25 stitches per inch, I plan one day to knit the classic “Nordic Stars” modernization, too.

Some knitting magazines try to survive as mere accessories to the marketing of New York “fashions.” Outside of New York those magazines tend to look silly even while they’re “in” the look that usually does not become “fashion” anywhere else, and who wants the magazines after the “fashion” craze dies? Knitter’s was different. Founded by people who appreciated knitting and knitted things as sources of pleasure in their own right with no connection to the silliness of “fashion,” based in South Dakota not New York, Knitter’s gave the world over 100 collections of designs that will continue to inspire knitters for another 100 years. The novelty yarns the sponsors paid the designers to use, each season, are gone forever. Knitters can continue reusing the designs that appeal to them with the yarn we have now. So, while the “fashion” knitting magazines have mostly been recycled, copies of Knitter’s are gaining resale value.

This relatively recent issue is still available at reasonable prices on Amazon. To buy a copy in support of this web site, send $5 per copy, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address below...I know you can get it directly from Amazon for a little less (not much less when you figure shipping charges), but you need to support this web site too. Also, that $5 per package will cover shipping costs for ten or twelve more books/magazines of this size; it adds up!

The blanket's sold, but it's still possible to buy the sweater. Yes, the sweater and the magazine would fit into one $5 package.

Book Review: Teen Knitting Club

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Teen Knitting Club

Author: Jennifer Wenger et al.

Date: 2004

Publisher: Artisan

ISBN: 1-57965-244-1

Length: 142 pages

Illustrations: color photos and graphics

Quote: “I like working with my hands. It’s rewarding to finish a project and be able to wear it.”

Here’s another basic knitting book for beginners. How does it stack up next to Melanie Falick’s Kids Knitting, Kathrin Behrens' Primer Libro de Punto, or Angela Wilkes' Knitting?

Size. Of the four, it’s the biggest book. That’s because it’s spiral-bound so the pages lie flat. Beginning knitters will appreciate this feature.

Number of patterns. More than Kids Knitting, fewer than Knitting or Primer Libro de Punto—but also more of the different patterns are for scarves, more are for silly novelty yarns that won’t be in stores (or be missed) in most seasons, and the sweater patterns are more fads rather than classics. All patterns are for teenaged girls. Hats and scarves are actually gender-neutral and some are photographed on boys, but the sweaters, bags, and ponchos are 2004 fashion statements. Experienced knitters can fix the 2004 fad features in the sweater patterns if they really want to knit super-chunky sweaters. Beginners can’t. So the number of patterns the beginning knitter will actually use is probably about even with the number in Kids Knitting. Beginners who want to knit more different classic garments will wish they had Knitting. For those who read Spanish (at all), Primer Libro de Punto offers by far the most usable patterns, but then, some of them are intended to be used after beginners have gained some experience from the dead-easy patterns.

Eye appeal. No comparison: Kids Knitting wins in this category, hands down, with its photos of adorable kids knitting and modelling on a lovely sheep farm. Primer Libro de Punto offers clear, straightforward photos that show the products without an obvious effort to add any extra kind of eye appeal. Knitting is a budget-conscious book, suitable for homeschoolers, with drawings instead of photos. Teen Knitting Club has full-color photos instead of drawings, but some of the photos don’t show the knitted product as clearly as they might. The eye-rolling girl modelling the basic Stockinette Scarf is also modelling a hat (instructions included) and a cardigan (instructions not included), which borders on False Advertising.

Datedness. The more fashion-conscious a pattern collection is, the less appeal it has every season after printing. Here again, no comparison: all three of the other books beat Teen Knitting Club. However, if you update the garments you wear with it, there’s really not much “fashion” about a hat, scarf, or blanket, which is what most of the patterns produce. The pictures look dated but the knitted products can still be used.

Clarity of instructions. Here again, Teen Knitting Club has room for improvement. The authors consider 4 stitches per inch “medium weight” knitting (actually it’s pretty bulky, as knitters will agree if they try wearing it). They recommend using circular needles to knit hats, which some beginners find confusing. You can only learn to make plain and purl stitches once, and those who learned from books rather than from people usually favor the book from which they learned; I think the graphics showing how the stitches are made look clear and simple, but then I learned to make them several years before this book was written.

Informativeness. Primer Libro de Punto rules this category with instructions for making not only different styles of garments, but different pattern stitches in addition to stock and garter stitch. All three of the other books introduce sock and mitten knitting; Teen Knitting Club does not.

Cuteness. All three of the American books outscore Knitting in the “cute and clever” category. I rate Kids Knitting at the top of this category, but then again the focus on middle school kids may be off-putting for teenyboppers who’d rather look at pictures of girls with lipstick and boys with mustaches.

So, which one would I use to teach a knitting class? Umm...there’s a reason why I bought all four, right? For a mixed group, if I had to choose one, I’d choose Knitting; its frugal design packs most information per cubic inch.

Knitting patterns, consisting as they do mostly of pictures and numbers, are surprisingly easy for experienced knitters around the world to read. I’ve heard of knitters who spoke only English figuring out knitting patterns that were written in Japanese! (That I’ve not tried.) Really raw beginners who don’t speak Spanish would probably not be able to use Primer Libro de Punto, but the ones who really learn to knit will be surprised by how soon they will be able to use it. Adults can learn from either Kids Knitting or Teen Knitting Club. Only for a group of terribly age-conscious schoolchildren does the age difference of the models in Kids Knitting and Teen Knitting Club matter—and some teenagers (and adults) would actually prefer wearing the “kid” sizes.

Teenagers using Teen Knitting Club today might feel something close to what I felt, in junior high school, “rapping” by mail with a church Sunday School program written in the cutting-edge slang of 1963. Polite teenagers my age didn’t say to friendly adults, as the teenaged offspring of people my age seem to do, “These worksheets are so out of date it hurts,” but I do remember looking at some of those worksheets and thinking, “Who says that any more? Did anybody ever say that, and if so what did it mean? ‘Rap sheets’ aren’t correspondence, they’re criminal records, and ‘rapping’ isn’t hanging out, it’s like ‘talking blues’ only faster, and I just know those oldies do not want anybody ‘rapping with’ them! Those poor oldies worked so hard to write something that would seem relevant ten or fifteen years ago, and they’ve still got copies on their hands, and the kids they wrote these worksheets for are all selling insurance and driving buses now...”

Then again...I worked through those worksheets, despite pitying the oldies who’d written them, and learned where to find the main “proof texts” in the Bible by using them. And today’s teenagers will probably look at that pullover with the sleeves draping down over the model’s hand and think “Yikes—did people actually wear that?” (The answer is no; fashion victims bought or made sleeves like that, but they rolled them up if they wore the sweaters.) Nevertheless, they can still enjoy making hats, scarves, and blankets as explained in this book.

For a knitting class—I would seriously recommend, if the class meets in a wool shop where there’s room for such things, bringing in the whole collection of how-to-knit books. Some students may actually respond best to the explication of plain and purl stitch in Mildred Graves Ryan's (error-ridden) Knitting for Pleasure—it worked for me—or the one in Knitting Without Tears, and why should students be deprived of Sally Melville’s fabulous Knitting Experience collection? Let students pass them around for reference while making their first sweaty little garter stitch scarves, and choose their own “real projects.” Some are likely to favor the ponchos and cell phone bags in Teen Knitting Club.

Verdict: Teen Knitting Club still has something special to offer high school and college students.

I’m a well-known pattern hoarder, and even I have found it easy to knit through this book and pass it on. But I was too old for it when it was printed. Teen Knitting Club does have merit, not the least of which is the way it suggests ways teen knitters can (still) mingle and have a ton of fun. Knitting is a skill that has many teen-specific applications...relieving stress, meeting people, math, charity, bonding with older people...This book is only one among many that can teach beginners how to knit, but it’s the only one that really tells teenagers why.

And, what to do with that pattern for a super-chunky pullover in which any fashion victim who actually wore it might have fainted from the heat? In view of the current fashion for thin, transparent sweater-oid objects “just for layering,” why not buy some skinny yarn—Michaels often offers good deals on sock yarn—and knit a thin, transparent, lacy version? Bingo, you’d be back at the dizzy, daffy height of fashion. Though whenever I wore anything that was all that fashionable, as a teenager, I always wanted to die of embarrassment.

To buy Teen Knitting Club here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address, as discussed in the Greeting Post, and we'll send $1 to Wenger or a charity of her choice. I've not actually tried to squeeze all four of the basic knitting books compared in this review into a $5 package, but, since Knitting is a thin book and Kids Knitting and Primer Libro de Punto are standard-sized, I think they could all be shipped together for a total of $25 (to Boxholder at P.O. Box 322) or $26 (to the e-mail address you get from salolianigodagewi @ yahoo).  

Book Review: (A Handbook of) American Crewel Embroidery

Title: (A Handbook of) American Crewel Embroidery 



Author: Muriel L. Baker

Date: 1966

Publisher: Charles E. Tuttle

ISBN: none

Length: 67 pages

Illustrations: many drawings and black-and-white photos

Quote: "While mounds sometimes occupied only a small part of the whole design...they other times formed the whole base of the design. Very often the latter was the case with petticoat borders."

Crewel embroidery is defined as embroidery done with relatively thick "crewel wools, which are slackly twisted two-ply worsted yarns," rather than fine cotton thread or silk floss. Historically, this relatively fast and cheap kind of embroidery was often used for very fancy "painting with yarn" effects. Crewel is not unlike drawing and painting--it can be used to make simple line doodles, or elaborate three-dimensional pictures with subtly shaded colors.

Baker found dozens of garments, linens, purses, chair cushions, and framed pictures that were not only attractive enough to be preserved in museums, but also clear enough to be documented in black-and-white photos. This limits her selection to relatively simple colorwork.

She explains briefly how the basic embroidery stitches are formed, and provides clear, traceable templates for embroidering birds, flowers, animals and even a mermaid in the sizes and styles found on the museum pieces dating back to the eighteenth century. No templates are provided for motifs used in the more recent pieces, which might still have been considered subject to copyright.

This attractive little book was successful enough in its day that it's still available for its original price, or even less, so you may buy it here for our minimum price of $5 per book + $5 per package. Although Muriel Baker no longer needs a dollar, we can probably squeeze four or five Fair Trade Books into the package, which may make this price quite competitive.

Book Review: Better Homes & Gardens Needlepoint

Title: Better Homes & Gardens Needlepoint

        
Author: Better Homes & Gardens magazine staff

        
Date: 1978

        
Publisher: Meredith Corporation

        
ISBN: 0-696-00475-5

        
Length: 96 pages, with many color photos and diagrams

        
Quote: “Crafting beautiful fabric is what needlepoint is all about.”

        
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some things this book shows readers how to stitch are a wreath of roses on canvas, a bargello bench, a weird geometric wall canvas that I wouldn’t have recognized as depicting apples (in different stages, including one apple that’s been eaten down to the core, which looks a bit like a dog’s bone), a welcome mat that might be too blue-and-white-clean to step on, a mirror framed in flower images, lots of pillows, a miniature rugs for a doll’s house, needlepoint flowers cut and shaped round wire, a plastic-canvas jewel box, a pair of pillow-shaped dolls, a big round hassock with a landscape on it,a string-embroidered canvas rug that looks like a knitted lace sampler, a chair seat, small baskets for holding bobbins or pencils, a wreath of fruit images, an impressionistic fishpond picture worked as an odd-shaped rug, a distinctly weird-looking Nativity scene with pillow-shaped people, and a pyramid-shaped psychedelic-colored figure that I had to be told was meant to be a lion rather than (perhaps) a member of the Muppet Show orchestra. I think some of these projects are indeed beautiful, and some are pretty silly, myself.

        
However, with the possible exception of the psychedelic “lion,” they’re not things that go out of style. They’re still things people can enjoy making today. If you have the more desirable kind of friends and relatives who will appreciate the honor of your doing handwork just for them, rather than the vulgar kind who prefer money, then you can still enjoy even the pleasure of giving them as presents. Even that psychedelic “lion” would look kind of cute on the shelf beside those Beatles LPs, if you are or know a person who still has Beatles LPs.

        
And, as usual with needlepoint books that present a great variety of simple patterns, some of the designs would look good in cross-stitch, intarsia knitting, maybe even filet crochet, too. (The sizes and proportions would change, of course, but the designs would still work.)

Better Homes & Gardens Needlepoint is not the work of an individual author and thus not part of the Fair Trade Books program. To buy it online, you'd still need to send salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com $5 for the book + $5 for shipping. If you buy it along with a Fair Trade Book, you pay only one shipping charge and some deserving writer, or his or her charity, gets a dollar or more. So, this web site recommends that you buy a Fair Trade Book and throw this one into the package. 

Book Review: Setting Up Your Sewing Space

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Setting Up Your Sewing Space

        
Author: Myrna Giesbrecht

Author's web site: http://blog.myrnagiesbrecht.com/

        
Date: 1994

        
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company

        
ISBN: 0-8069-0495-X

        
Length: 160 pages including graphics, charts,and index

        
Quote: “I live, eat, and breathe fabric.”

        
And yes, this is a book primarily about how to avoid breathing fabric if you prefer not to breathe fabric...how to organize your supplies so that you have time for actual sewing rather than trying to remember where you put things. If you have trouble keeping your “creative clutter” in a genuinely creative, organic order rather than letting it turn into a hopeless mess, this book just might help you.

        
For some of us, I suspect, using this book with good intentions will be just another excuse to play with our toys (and possibly be inspired by them). I don’t sew, myself, but I’m like this about knitting. I collect yarn. Very early in my knitting life, there was one day when, inspired by Kaffe Fassett’s approach in Glorious Knitting, I just threw a lot of balls of yarn around the bland, beige, mostly empty sitting room just to notice what looked good next to what else. When the sitting room was fairly well wall-to-wall unravelling balls of mixed yarns, someone came to the door. The “don’t want to know what goes on in this flat” vibration was overwhelming. Not immediately, but before my flatmate came in, I sorted all those yarns by weight and color and repacked them all into wooden storage cubes...

        
Actually, if you’re interested in a book like Setting Up Your Sewing Space, you probably do want to know about my cubes. They used to be sold at Hechinger’s, which used to be a local hardware, furniture, home improvement store chain in Washington. They looked just like these, once you'd put them together, and cost about one-quarter to one-third as much. A Google search turns up lots of sources for 15" particle-board cubes, foreign and domestic, preassembled or not, and even a video showing how to put them together.

        
Anyway, organizing and reorganizing our craft supplies is one of the sensuous pleasures of doing handcrafts. Setting Up Your Sewing Space will tempt you. Maybe, after using these nifty organizing ideas, you could move in more fabric, a different sewing machine for different projects, a quilting frame...and you know authors of craft books, most of whom get their ideas by working in craft shops, aren’t going to tell you not to buy more supplies and plan more projects. (After all, there might be a yarn, fabric, wood, etc. shortage some day, and we all know that crafters don't survive their last project.) Or, if we plan projects to use up everything in the local craft store, and then realize that we’d have to pursue our crafts every day for 200 years to finish all those projects, the current owner of the local store can move to St Croix and we can keep the store ourselves...

        
Just kidding! If you’re determined to use this book sensibly, organize space, and have a place for everything and everything in its place even while you’re working on a maximum of three projects at one time, you can be that rare and exceptional member of our tribe, the constant crafter who never bites off more than s/he can chew or allows the craft supplies to spill out past the doorway of the workroom. Such people exist. If you’re determined to be one of them, this book will show you how.

        

If you’d rather be like most of us and leave 300 unfinished projects to your favorite charity, and why not, charity stores collect lots of money for good causes that way, this book can inspire you to have more fun fiddling with your supply collection. And even branch out...part of this book contains tips on sewing and quilting techniques you may not have tried yet.

Other online booksellers may offer a lower price but, so far as I know, this is the only site that will send Myrna Giesbrecht 10% of the total price of her book ($5) plus shipping ($5). You pay only one $5 shipping charge for as many items as can be shipped in one package, and Giesbrecht or a charity of her choice still gets $1 for each book you buy here. E-mail salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com.