Christmas Craft Source Book- Over Two-hundred Ideas And Motifs For The Festive Season

CHRISTMAS CRAFTS SOURCE BOOK: Over 200 Ideas and Motifs for the Festive Season Lawther, Gail

It's almost never too early for Christmas, at least for those who plan on fashioning holiday-oriented home accessories, tree decorations, and gifts. Instead of concentrating on one specific craft or focusing on one particular theme, Lawther selects 11 different holiday motifs and then shows, by way of color photographs, a few directions, and a lot of templates, how these patterns can be used. Snowflakes, for instance, can be drawn on paper tablecloths with an opaque white felt pen. Old-fashioned lace-up boot ornaments symbolize a Victorian Christmas. And seasonal greens are captured for posterity on a place mat bordered with cross-stitch ivy leaves. A roundup of materials and techniques at the end instruct the reader on the basics of crafts, from embroidery to stenciling. Barbara Jacobs

Here Lawther (The Complete Quilting Course, LJ 4/15/93) offers ideas and designs for home holiday decorations, with "source book" in this case referring to the book's patterns and instructions, not a directory of suppliers. Line drawings of holiday motifs suitable for copying are given in topical chapters with a general chapter of materials and techniques at the end. A historical background and summary of use of motifs in different countries is an interesting feature of each chapter. Color photographs show suggested projects, although there are no step-by-step instructions for these. The material, although attractively presented, is rather conventional and doesn't add much to the holiday material already available in other craft books and magazines. Recommended only for public libraries in need of new Christmas material to replace a dwindling collection.?Constance Ashmore Fairchild, formerly with Univ. of Illinois Lib., Urbana-Champaign
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.