Homemade: The Heart and Science of Handcrafts - Hardcover

Sterbenz, Carol Endler

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416547177 ISBN 13: 9781416547174

Publisher: Scribner, 2011

Synopsis

Offering an abundance of information and inspiration, Homemade is a revelatory addition to the craft world—the ultimate reference book on crafting and also a warm, engagingly written book that combines history and personal narrative with the science that makes a craft possible and the passion that inspires it.

Carol Endler Sterbenz is a crafter, a teacher, a homemaker, a wife, and a mother. Raised by immigrant parents who taught her the enduring value of resourcefulness and creativity, she makes her lifetime of experience and infinite enthusiasm the foundation for Homemade. Sterbenz provides readers with not only practical information and direction but also a philosophy and methodology of crafting that build confidence and ability, making it easy to achieve truly professional results.

Teeming with clear, reliable, and thorough information on everything from tools and materials to techniques, Homemade is an essential guide to seven of the most beloved crafts: beading, the flower arts, paper crafting, hand printing, decoupage, decorative embellishing, and children’s arts and crafts.

Crafters—beginners and veterans alike—can turn to Homemade to learn which glues and finishes to use, how to form a perfect beaded loop, assemble a miniature robot, hollow out an egg, emboss paper, make a hand-tied bouquet, or transform a chandelier. Overflowing with hundreds of techniques; easy-to-follow step-by-step directions supported by more than eight hundred beautiful and precise hand-drawn illustrations, diagrams, and patterns; and countless insider secrets and troubleshooting tips, Homemade is an indispensable go-to reference no crafter should be without.

About this title

Review:

Amazon Exclusive: Cheryl Mendelson Reviews Homemade: The Heart and Science of Handcrafts

Cheryl Mendelson is the author of Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House.

This thorough, inviting, and lucidly written book deserves a place on a shelf in every home. Carol Sterbenz is a lifelong crafter who learned her love of creating at her talented parents' knees, along with skills and familiarity with a wide variety of materials and techniques. What makes this book special is its highly knowledgeable update of tradition through contemporary materials and techniques by someone full of ingenuity, who really knows her stuff and has plenty of exciting ideas for projects. As any book on making lovely things should be, this one is itself a lovely object, with wonderful line drawings and photos that make things clear, an appealing dust cover, paper you love to touch, and that nice book smell.

It is a huge work, nearly 800 pages long, and it covers beading, working with flowers and foliage (fresh and artificial), paper, hand printing (block, stencil, screen, and more), decoupage, glass etching, candle making--in fact too much to tell. Her instructions are superb. If you want to get your children away from their computers and electronic entertainments for a while, you will love Chapter Seven, "Children's Arts and Crafts," which has everything they want and need. Sterbenz is also a former teacher as well as a mother, and she knows what skills are appropriate to a child's age and what projects will excite their interest.

Sterbenz's knowledge of craft comes directly out of folk traditions and includes ideas passed on from generation to generation. But, for her, craft isn't just imitating great-grandparents and working with their materials and tastes. It's adopting their attitudes, their flexibility, their keen eye for the potential of objects and goods (including, often enough, materials the older generations themselves never have heard of), their affection for beauty, and their natural inclination to make things out of the materials in their world, their trust in their own taste, and—most important of all—their joy and satisfaction in making something from scratch.

Crafters, actual and would-be, will surely value this book highly, but so will everyone who takes special pleasure in attractive material objects marked by the unique stamp of some real person's heart, soul, and hands. That, of course, is just about everyone--teens and twenty-somethings who yearn to engage with the physical world, working people looking for leisure pleasure, and retirees who have always loved making things and at last have some time to indulge that love. --Cheryl Mendelson

About the Author:

Carol Endler Sterbenz is a well-known author, editor, and media personality. She has written more than twenty-five craft and decorating books including Pottery Barn Design Library: Storage and Display, American Country Folk Crafts, and the Instant Gratification series (Chronicle Books). A former syndicated columnist of By Hand and Primary Colors: Interiors, Ms. Sterbenz was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly magazine Handcraft Illustrated. She lives with her husband, John, in Westchester County in NY.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1416547177
• ISBN 13: 9781416547174
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 800
• Illustrator: Bates Harry