The Big-A** Book of Crafts, by Mark Montano

Description:  The Big-A** Book of Crafts is packed with ideas for sprucing up your living space; concocting fabulous, all-natural body products; designing your own unique stationery; and creating countless other crafts that will convince your friends and loved ones that you're the secret love child of Martha Stewart (only much, much cooler).

Forget crocheted doilies and itchy knit sweaters -- TLC's While You Were Out top designer Mark Montano has created stylish and imaginative projects that range from a Warhol-esque Ultrasuede iPod case to photo-adorned boxer shorts to African mask patio chairs to wooden night-light boxes. Divided into sections that include Outdoorsy (ideas to enhance your backyard), Dishing It Out (decorating plates using different techniques), You've Been Framed (innovative picture framing ideas), and Can I Have a Light? (creating and decorating lamps, lanterns, and chandeliers), it's as entertaining to read as it is endlessly inspiring. With more than one hundred and fifty inventive and fun projects, The Big-A** Book of Crafts is the perfect activity book for readers of every mood, budget, and skill level.

My Thoughts:  I love to upcycle...that means take unloved things and make them useful to be loved again.  This book is full of ideas to upcycle things into usable home decor and gifts!  My husband and I poured over this book and decided we need a very large house to accommodate every idea we liked in, The Big-A** Book of Crafts.

There are great templates that you can use, humor and some projects...are just strange.  I cannot say that I am a fan of every project, but overall, there are far more projects in this book, that I like, than I will be able to tackle in one full year!  Simply put, if you craft...get this book.

See an excerpt of this book, click here.

Presentations: A Passion For Gift Wrapping, by Carolyne Roehm

Description:  With her brilliant sense of style, designer and bestselling author Carolyne Roehm makes the case in Presentations that there’s just as much pleasure in wrapping gifts as in receiving them—and that beautiful packages guarantee memorable celebrations.

For everyone who loved At Home with Carolyne Roehm, one of America’s premier style-setters now offers her ideas for creating breathtaking gift wrappings using readily available paper, tags, rubber stamps, ribbons, artificial flowers, and other inexpensive materials. Arranged seasonally, and taking inspiration from Roehm’s love of nature, travel and collecting, and fine art, the book focuses on holidays as well as on ways to make children’s gifts look unique and adorable. As Roehm shows, with creativity and care any present can be made an exquisite offering.

More than two hundred dazzling photographs provide inspiration, and a clear and detailed how-to section gives readers the step-by-step tools they need to create beautiful gifts. And for those who would like to create stunning packages but have little time, the book also offers wonderfully distinctive—yet simple—gift-bagging ideas. To coordinate with these eye-popping wrappings, there are the author’s original theme-party ideas and distinctive table settings.

With Carolyne Roehm’s advice, anyone can elevate a special occasion to the realm of the unforgettable.

My Thoughts:  Presentations is a spectacular book!  With every page there is a new rush of creativity and ideas that flow through my brain!  The photography is amazing and many of these ideas are very easily created on a budget!

For the Shabbat hostess, she has several ways to incorporate gifts for the guests as part of the table setting...that alone is stunning and ingenious!  As you read this book a person is inspired to reach new heights of personal excellence.

For anyone that finds satisfaction in the details of life, Presentations is the book for you!  I rate this with an unequivocal five stars.

Dress Your Best: The Complete Guide to Finding the Style That's Right for Your Body, by Clinton Kelly and Stacy London

Description: The 8 million fans of TLC’s hottest show, What Not to Wear, know it as the place to go for real-life fashion advice. Now the show’s hosts, Clinton Kelly and Stacy London, offer spot-on fashion wisdom—with an attitude—in this fully illustrated, authoritative, and irreverent fashion guide to dressing your best for every occasion. Clinton and Stacy’s surefire method for boosting appearance rests on their belief that we can all win admiring glances by selecting clothes that play up our positives and create a balanced body shape. In Dress Your Best, Clinton and Stacy match a wide range of female and male body types with the perfect work, casual, and evening attire, showing you exactly how to make your best parts “work” for you.

Dressing tips for 26 body types!
Features 18 women and 8 men: bigger on top, bigger on bottom, a little extra in the middle, not curvy, extra curvy, small-framed, athletic, and more!

Whether you’re searching for a way to accentuate your assets, puzzling over the right print pattern for your frame, or just looking for a solution to the dilemma “What do I need to wear to look fabulous?” you’ll find here the universal tips, dos and don’ts, seasonal alternatives, and must-haves that will deliver the answers. Dress Your Best is certain to become the standard by which all other fashion guides are measured.

My Thoughts:  This book is so necessary for the Shabbat dinner hostess!  After you have poured so much love into making the meal, decorating the table and adding all of those finishing touches and details...you need to look the part as well!  Trust me, it is not in how much you spend on your clothes that matters, but rather how much time you have spent researching your figure and how to wear the clothes you have or look for the right clothes when you are able to shop.

I will say that there are some immodest ideas, but with creativity, you can easily make the clothing ideas and suggestions in Dress Your Best work for you.  Don't settle for frumpy when you know you can be fabulous! 

The Weekend Crafter: Gourd Crafts, by Ginger Summit

Description:  A guide to using the Cucurbita and Lagenaria siceraria (a sort of hard shelled pumpkin), for a range of decorative uses in the home and in the garden. No special tools or equipment are needed, standard craft materials such as a scalpel, paints, leather dyes, shoe polish, varnish and stains. The projects include cups and bowls, bracelets, carved vase, duck-shaped birdhouse, stamped and woodburned earrings, masks, candle holders, ornamental flowerpots and an African musical rattle.

My Thoughts: I don't know that I would recommend this book for the beginner, but there are people with talent that can easily pull it off!  Outside of being more than my own skill level, this book is fantastic!  The photographs bring a rather ugly looking dried squash into the realm of beautiful and artistic.

The various crafts that are shown are beautiful and can easily be changed to reveal your own personal style and taste level.  I love all of the different uses for the sustainable gourd and what a great opportunity to grow your own craft from scratch!

Gourd Crafts For The First Time, by Marilyn Host

Description:  Most ancient cultures used gourds in every aspect of life. Decorating gourds is everybody's favorite craft, as you'll see from the more than two-dozen varied projects shown here. A handy guide tells you where to find or buy gourds, and how to prepare them. Then use your easily-learned skills with leather-dye, egg-dye, spray and acrylic paint, wax shoe polish, découpage, airbrush, waxed linen, dyed raffia, and beads. Select your projects: storage containers for food, medicine, herbs, seeds, oils, jewelry, and even sacred objects. Turn dipper gourds into ladles, bowls, and cooking utensils, or create musical instruments such as thumb pianos, harps, banjos, drums, and rattles, as well as a variety of masks, earrings and necklaces, piggy banks, bird feeders, birdhouses, toys, candleholders, and luminaries.

My Thoughts:  I was not exposed to decorating with vegetables most of my life and was not very interested in Native American art which did use alot of gourds in the area I grew up in.  However, with some life changes that have been made, I am very interested in sustainable crafts projects and growing your own gourds for a craft project...that is very sustainable.

This book has a wealth of information for the beginner!  Tools, techniques, repairs...everything seems to be listed that one needs to get started in crafting with a gourd.  There are uses for gourds that really never crossed my mind and I look forward to growing some this coming spring in my little container garden!

Creative Nature Crafts, by Alison Jenkins with Tessa Evelegh

Description:  Presents over 100 creative ideas for using natural materials to create simple, effective gifts and decorations. Projects are accompanied by clear instructions and include spring baskets, shell boxes, pot pourri, scented stationery and decorated candles.

My Thoughts:  My mother would have loved this book!  She had a country decor style and every craft featured I could have seen her employ in her home.  The pressed flowers and the Victorian ribbon woven lavender is stunning!  These are so beautiful and the kind of lovely touches that a hostess can use to make her guests feel more at home.  With creativity you can take any of these techniques and apply them to many different ideas, not just what is shown in this book. 

The Complete Flower Arranger's Companion, by Neophytou, Bacon, Morris, Hatala, and Reeves

Description:  Demonstrates how to successfully create stunning floral designs using fresh, dried, and artificial flowers, providing innovated suggestions for more than one hundred gifts and arrangements.

My Thoughts:  This is one of the best books I have seen so far with flower arranging!  Fresh flowers are not always easily accessible in some climates (or a horrendous price) and when flower gardens die, artificial or dried flowers are the only alternatives in some hostesses budgets.

The full color photographs are beautiful and extremely enticing!  The ideas are very ingenious and quite delightful and refreshing.  The Directory of Flowers and Foliage is very helpful.  The authors are very good about what is needed for tools and techniques.

Overall, this book is excellent!  If you are like me and lacking in a green thumb, but want a natural approach to decorating...try some of these dried flower arrangements, I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised!

Martha Stewart's Encyclopedia of Crafts

Description:  For nearly 20 years, home crafters have turned to the pages of Martha Stewart Living for all kinds of crafts projects, each presented in the magazine’s inimitable style. Now, the best of those projects, including step-by-step instructions and full-color photographs, have been collected into a single encyclopedia.

Organized by topic from A to Z, Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Crafts contains complete instructions and brief histories for more than 30 techniques, detailed descriptions of the necessary tools and materials, and easy-to-copy templates. Martha and her team of crafts editors guide readers through each subject, from botanical pressing and decoupage to rubber stamping and wreaths, with characteristic clarity and unparalleled attention to detail.

Crafters of all skill and experience levels will appreciate the many variations presented for each technique. For example, candlemaking presents a comprehensive array of poured, rolled, and cutout candles, including instructions for making your own one-of-a-kind rubber candle molds, floating candles, sand candles, and more. Each craft in the book takes on charming new dimensions with innovations that could come only from the team behind Martha Stewart Living.

In addition, each entry in Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Crafts is chock-full of tips and advice. Handy glossaries in the entries--such as a comprehensive gem glossary, a glitter glossary, and a color glossary for making tinted wax--are valuable references that crafters will refer to again and again. What’s more, the Tools and Materials section outlines the best essential supplies that every crafter needs to have on hand, and the Sources pages clue readers in to the vendors and suppliers that the magazine’s crafts editors rely on most.

Filled with solid technical know-how, and presented with gorgeous color photographs, this handy guide can be read page by page and kept as a lasting reference by crafters and artisans alike.

My Thoughts:  This book is amazing!  There is a little bit of everything...for everyone.  All tastes and styles seem to be covered and yet there is room to make the craft your own and personalize it with your own taste.

I am very impressed with the glossary, the section that is full of templates and the index of course has been very helpful!  The full color photographs make even the simplest craft look appealing and enticing.  As skill is acquired, the crafter who chooses to use this book for ideas will have a million dollar look in their home or gift giving for a fraction of the price!

This is an essential book for the Shabbat hostess who is on a budget!  There are more ideas than you can shake a stick at for making your table beautiful, unique and personalized.  There are ideas to make even the bathroom a very pleasant experience for your guests if you are willing to add some creativity and some imagination.  I rate this book with five stars...every crafter needs this one!

Great Wedding Parties, by Donna Kooler

Product Description:  This fun-filled book contains fantastic ideas for creative ways to entertain guests -- all with sparkling style that will never reveal how affordable everything was. Not just for weddings, the featured ideas can be tailored for other events, too!

My Thoughts:  This is a wonderful book that is full of fabulous ideas!  Though it is titled for weddings, with creativity anyone can make these settings and scapes for a Shabbat table.

There are recipes (not vegan, but they can be adapted) to tempt the palette of the guests.  There are design templates that can be reproduced for your personal use...perfect for the dinner party!  The full color photos are perfect for inspiration.  All in all this is a fabulous book!

You may view an excerpt from our affiliate, Amazon.com.