Here are 100 books that The Complete Practical Guide to Card-Making fans have personally recommended if you like
The Complete Practical Guide to Card-Making.
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I am a children’s author and have written over 100 picture book texts for young children, including the best-selling Aliens Love Underpants series. I also enjoy making beautiful things for my home and garden, and for friends and family. Whilst writing is hard work, this other creative side is pure relaxation and ‘switch off’ time. But any projects have to be easily achievable within snatched moments in a busy work life. So here are my top crafting books for people who love creating things but, like me, don’t have much time...
This is an adorable book of seaside makes and beach-inspired projects. It's a beautiful book to look through with lots of inspirational photos to spark your imagination. Some of the projects are more complicated but I found it easy to simplify them myself and the end results still looked great. However busy you are, you’ll definitely have time to make the fabric flowers – easy-peasy and so pretty. I use them on gift tags.
Recreate memories of the seaside with simple sewing, papercraft, crochet and knitting projects using beautiful Tilda fabrics, yarn and embellishments. Be inspired by life at the beach and in the ocean to make gifts, toys and pretty accessories for your home. From adorable whales and fishing girl dolls to hanging mobiles, applique blankets and summer scarves, the designs will take you on a journey of the perfect seaside holiday.
I am a children’s author and have written over 100 picture book texts for young children, including the best-selling Aliens Love Underpants series. I also enjoy making beautiful things for my home and garden, and for friends and family. Whilst writing is hard work, this other creative side is pure relaxation and ‘switch off’ time. But any projects have to be easily achievable within snatched moments in a busy work life. So here are my top crafting books for people who love creating things but, like me, don’t have much time...
This author has a knack for making the simplest things look beautiful. Very vintage in style and many projects can be cheaply put together with old bits and bobs you may have around the house. Start collecting any buttons, ribbons, and pretty fabrics!
If you love the vintage look, you can often pick up bits and pieces easily and cheaply (like old fashioned pretty china or decorative items) at charity shops and boot fairs.
Willow casts her crafting style all around the house and beyond, making things you will want to keep for yourself or reluctantly give away as presents. The first chapter, 'To Decorate', includes floral napkin rings, seasonal wreaths, Christmas baubles and vintage fabric bunting. 'To Hang' shows how to fill printers' trays with your own treasures, make pictures from buttons and create your own pinboard with fabulous ribbons. 'To Nest' includes ideas for grainsack cushions and pillows, block print napkins and heart-shaped lavender bags. In 'To Wear', there are fabric-twisted bracelets, silk-trimmed straw hats and simple linen aprons. 'To Use' is…
I am a children’s author and have written over 100 picture book texts for young children, including the best-selling Aliens Love Underpants series. I also enjoy making beautiful things for my home and garden, and for friends and family. Whilst writing is hard work, this other creative side is pure relaxation and ‘switch off’ time. But any projects have to be easily achievable within snatched moments in a busy work life. So here are my top crafting books for people who love creating things but, like me, don’t have much time...
Twenty five quick and easy sewing makes for using up fat quarters or leftover remnants of fabric. Lots of cute ideas to pretty up your home, or great little stocking fillers for Christmas. There is a series of these books if you get hooked!
Fat Quarter: Quick Makes is part of a fantastic new series of stash-busting sewing books aimed at beginner to intermediate crafters. There are 25 super-quick and easy projects to make, all from fat quarters to fabric scraps. Each project has easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions and beautiful accompanying photography, as well as a useful tools and techniques section. This book is ideal for using up leftover remnants of fabric from your stash to create a range of decorative and useful items in a flash. Projects include: book bag, baby dress, eye mask, bunting, festival flag, owl brooch passport cover, makeup bag.
I am a children’s author and have written over 100 picture book texts for young children, including the best-selling Aliens Love Underpants series. I also enjoy making beautiful things for my home and garden, and for friends and family. Whilst writing is hard work, this other creative side is pure relaxation and ‘switch off’ time. But any projects have to be easily achievable within snatched moments in a busy work life. So here are my top crafting books for people who love creating things but, like me, don’t have much time...
Now you can enjoy crafting without harming the planet! All you need to do is save up some recyclable or foraged items such as cardboard, newspaper, wine bottle corks, twigs and pine cones. You can choose your own colour schemes to match your home and, because the materials are recyclable, you could make new ones every year!
If you love Christmas, you'll love this book! It's the perfect antidote to the traditional tinsel and glitter that shed harmful microplastics, polluting our oceans and waterways.
The Eco-Christmas Craft Book is filled with lots of ideas to create your own stylishly beautiful, eco-friendly Christmas.
All you need to do is save up some recyclable or foraged items such as cardboard, newspaper, wine bottle corks, twigs and pine cones. You can choose your own colour scheme to match your home and, because the materials are recyclable, you could make new ones every year!
When I was in middle school, I’d spend much of my time in class daydreaming. Imagining myself in, say, a debate with someone I disagree with and going through a litany of scenarios where I’d try to convince that other person to change their mind. It’s a lot of fun. (My teachers would likely disagree.) When I grew older, I did more of that on my daily walks, and then about 11 years ago, I decided to start writing about creative ways to teach someone something they’re vehemently opposed to or just ambivalent about. I’ve published four books since then on this topic.
I understand better by sketching things on paper. I couldn’t get abstract ideas first go, I had to draw them out. Someone on the Internet recommended that I get ahold of this book, and I’m glad I did.
It’s an encyclopedia of facts, but all explained using relative magnitudes. So instead of telling me a giraffe is this tall, I get to see it relative to a horse. I love that way of teaching.
I’ve always been fascinated by the convergence of the serious and the absurd. Raised on the experimental humor of the 90s, I was delighted to find that weird humor and an absurd sensibility were not limited to experimental novelists of the 20th century. In the literature of the Enlightenment, I found proof that taking a joke to its limit can also produce experimental insight, deep feeling, and intellectual discovery. I discovered a time when early novelists moved seamlessly between satirical mimicry and serious first-person narrative; when esoteric philosophy and scientific abstraction blended in with the weirdness of formalist experimentation. I discovered that the Enlightenment was anything but dull.
I love this book’s mixture of camp and macabre. Like Gulliver’s Travels, Walpole’s name didn’t appear in the original book—the preface claims it was a long-lost manuscript found in “the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England.”
Ghosts, giants, and dark secrets power this blend of medieval kitsch, tragic fatalism, and dark fantasy, and I find the strange mixture both funny and richly stylized. Walpole was a famous eccentric and obsessive about the lore of the Middle Ages, and I love how he mixes so many genres: he riffs on everything from Shakespeare to contemporary politics.
As a fan of Stranger Things, I love anything that creatively weaves together familiar genres while producing something new for the present. In doing so, Walpole helped to create the formula for contemporary horror.
"The Castle of Otranto," written by Horace Walpole, is considered the first Gothic novel. The story is set in a medieval castle and begins with the sudden, mysterious death of Conrad, the son of the tyrannical Prince Manfred. Manfred's plans to secure his lineage are compromised, leading him to hastily attempt to divorce his wife and marry Isabella, his son's betrothed.
The tale unfolds with supernatural occurrences, including a giant helmet that crushes Conrad, and the appearance of ghostly apparitions. As Manfred's actions become increasingly driven by desperation to maintain his power, the true heir to the Castle of Otranto,…
I’m a historian and writer who strives to combine the history of science and medicine, the study of visual culture, and cultural history in my work. Although I hated being dragged round art galleries and museums as a child, something must have stuck, laying the foundations for my interest in using images and artefacts to understand both the past and the present. Since the early 1990s I’ve been writing about portraits, how they work, and why they are important—I remain gripped by the compelling ways they speak to identity. It was a privilege to serve as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in London between 2001 and 2009.
London’s British Museum, with its massive and diverse collections, is world famous and the story of its foundation and early years in the eighteenth century sheds light on the histories of collecting, knowledge, and exploration. More than twenty essays were assembled to celebrate the opening of the Enlightenment Gallery in the King’s Library after years of research and refurbishment. These essays draw readers into the people, the objects, and the ideas that shaped this important and influential institution. The book is lavishly illustrated with gorgeous photographs of paintings and statues, coins, fossils, china, and much more—a wonderful way to grasp the museum’s stupendous holdings and also to understand better the controversies it has engendered.
The extraordinary companion to the British Museum's 250th anniversary exhibition. Opened in 1753 as the world's first public museum, the British Museum epitomized the Age of Enlightenment's dream of a rational universe. Indeed, in many ways the museum was the age's most potent instrument: the incarnation of a world that could be parsed, classified, and comprehended through the physical observation of objects, all in the name of reason, progress, and civic improvement.
In this lavishly illustrated volume, published to coincide with a new permanent exhibit, the museum's centrality to the Enlightenment enterprise is explored through the stunning breadth and variety…
I'm an experimental social psychologist and Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. I grew up in Hungary, and after an adventurous escape I ended up in Sydney. I received my DPhil and DSc degrees from the University of Oxford, and I spent various periods working at Oxford, Stanford, Heidelberg, and Giessen. For my work I received the Order of Australia, as well as the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. As somebody who experienced totalitarian communism firsthand, I am very interested in the reasons for the recent spread of totalitarian, tribal ideologies, potentially undermining Western liberalism, undoubtedly the most successful civilization in human history.
This is an incredibly interesting, well-written, and informative book that lays out the case for the amazing success of liberal democracies based on the Enlightenment values of liberty, universal humanism, and individualism.
I consider this book an essential reading for everyone who has been brainwashed by the current pessimistic and catastrophizing ideologies attacking this most successful of all human civilization.
Pinker is an outstanding writer, and the empirical evidence he marshals for the success and values of the Enlightenment in promoting human flourishing is utterly persuasive.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR
"My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates
If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality.
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third…
In 2021 I retired as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. For many years I had been interested not only in German literature but in European literature and culture more broadly, particularly in the eighteenth century. Oxford is a centre of Enlightenment research, being the site of the Voltaire Foundation, where a team of scholars has just finished editing the complete works of Voltaire. When in 2013 I was asked to write a book on the Enlightenment, I realized that I had ideal resources to hand – though I also benefited from a year’s leave spent at Göttingen, the best place in Germany to study the eighteenth century.
The late Roy Porter wanted to show that England did not lag behind Scotland in promoting Enlightenment, and assembled a huge quantity of material to show not just the theoretical but also the practical effects of Enlightenment. Ranging widely, he dwells on practical projects like the building of roads and canals, on the beginnings of industry (e.g. Wedgwood’s pottery factory at Etruria), and on reform of the criminal law. A distinguished historian of science, he says much about medical experiments, scientific research, and the increasingly humane treatment of mental disorders.
It is almost impossible to encapsulate briefly the range and variety contained in Roy Porter's major new book. For generations the focus for those wishing to understand the roots of the modern world has been France on the eve of the Revolution. Porter certainly acknowledges France's importance, but makes an overwhelming, fascinating case for considering Britain the "true" home of modernity - a country driven by an exuberance, diversity and power of invention comparable only to 20th-century America. Porter immerses the reader in a society which, recovering from the horrors of the Civil War and decisively reinvigorated by the revolution…
In 2021 I retired as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. For many years I had been interested not only in German literature but in European literature and culture more broadly, particularly in the eighteenth century. Oxford is a centre of Enlightenment research, being the site of the Voltaire Foundation, where a team of scholars has just finished editing the complete works of Voltaire. When in 2013 I was asked to write a book on the Enlightenment, I realized that I had ideal resources to hand – though I also benefited from a year’s leave spent at Göttingen, the best place in Germany to study the eighteenth century.
For centuries German historians underplayed the Enlightenment, treating it as an unwelcome foreign import. Writing with the zeal almost of a missionary, Reed shows that Germany participated fully in the Enlightenment, and that the great luminaries of the German classical age, Goethe and Schiller, continued its endeavours in individual and sometimes idiosyncratic ways. He also offers a unique introduction to the philosophy of Kant, showing how it developed in the specific milieu of Prussia under the Enlightened despot Frederick the Great, and drawing attention also to his pioneering work as a theoretical scientist: Kant was the first person to suggest that the nebulae visible beyond the Milky Way might be separate galaxies.
Germany's political and cultural past, from ancient times through World War II, has dimmed the legacy of its Enlightenment, which these days is far outshone by those of France and Scotland. In this book, T. J. Reed clears the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual history and reasserts the important role of Germany's Enlightenment. Reed looks closely at the arguments, achievements, conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their development of a lucid and active liberal thinking…
