THE CRAFTER'S COMPANION and your own craft space.

I spent some time at a bookstore tonight, and the evening would have been bland if I hadn't found this book:

 

The Crafter's Companion: Tips, Tales and Patterns from a Community of Creative Minds

 

A reviewer on Amazon said that it came out in the UK last year, but it's new in the US. This is a book with features on a bunch of people who run well-known craft blogs and small online shops, but who have not received a lot of book coverage or become the go-to people when craft book writers want to talk about crafters on the web (Jean Railla, Megan Reardon, Leah Kramer, Jenny Hart). I'm pretty sure they are not in the Austin or Portland "Craft Mafias" (Super Crafty, DIY Network's Stylelicious). They're people like Hilary from Wee Wonderfuls and Maitreya from CraftLog, blogs I really enjoy. (Also, the girl who does One Good Bumblebee: I'm so sorry, but I  can't remember her name just now.) 

In the book, the crafters talk about things like their personal histories, what inspires them, and what sort of workspace they have. You will be able to see that there is a wide range of women (and they are almost all women) aged about 25-50. Each person profiled also contributes a pattern: there is a bookcover, a utility tray made of thick felt, a cute tissue cover that looks like a house with eyes, and so on.

I don't actually own this book, and I wasn't able to spend more than a few minutes looking at it tonight, so I can't give it a fair review. All I can say is that I was impressed with what I saw: it looks really promising. The only thing is, it seems like the focus of the book is largely sewing-crafters, so just about all of the patterns are for small things to sew.

Last year, I spent a lot of time looking at this book, but ultimately didn't review it:

 

Organizing Your Craft Space

Jo Packham

 

To be honest, I felt that this book should have been called Organizing Your Fantasy Craft Space, because it quickly becomes apparent that the women profiled are not average crafters. These people own companies... and I'm not talking about small online shops, I'm talking about companies that make products that you buy at the craft store. Suze Weinberg is profiled here, for example... this is a woman who's had full page ads in rubber stamping magazines pretty much since there was such a thing, so of course her workroom is a showplace. A lot of suggestions in this book are impractical for actual organization, and a number of popular crafts are given short shrift. Some of the crafters involved in it have workspaces that are pretty, but don't seem extremely functional... more like a decorator's idea of a way to make a room look like it belongs to a person who creates things.

I mention this book here because I think The Crafter's Companion is, in its photos and descriptions of the workspaces of crafters who may have small businesses but are not too far removed from the average crafter, a lot more useful and accessible in this regard. There are some similarities in storage systems between the two books (I really had no idea how many people who work with fabric a lot just stack their fabric on shelves), but The Crafter's Companion probably has more to do with your real life. Or mine, anyway.

 

The Crafter Culture Handbook

Amy Spencer

 

Incidentally, has anyone seen The Crafter Culture Handbook? Given that I haven't been totally in love with the spate of "alternacraft" books in the last year or so (Craftivity, Bazaar Bizarre or vice-versa, AlternaCraft, etc), will I like it or hate it? The library doesn't have it, and I haven't seen it in a bookstore yet. Amazon reviews are few and completely mixed, suggesting that you've probably seen the stuff in the book online already, if you hang out on teh web.

And if you didn't hang out on "teh web," how is it that you are reading my blog right now?

Comments

[lulubird6]

[this is good] I've been waiting for that Crafter's Companion for a while now. I want to go now to eyeball it in person. I hate buying books over the internet, because I really want to see what's inside. Unless the book has been overwhelmingly reviewed on "teh web", like Lotta Jansdotter's Simple Sewing, which is my first craftbook purchase in a LONG time.

Jo Packham seems to deal with people that either are so ridiculously rich that they can spend a bazillion dollars on their craft rooms, or people that already make a bazillion dollars from the craft business. Her other book, which I got from the library,
Where Women Create: Inspiring Work Spaces of Creative Women
neither inspired me nor made me feel creative. I'm about as like to don April Cornell apparel as I am to poke my eyeballs out with chopsticks. Not a reflection on April Cornell, just on my personal taste. I felt like I needed to have a huge space to work in, and loads of money and time to cruise flea markets to purchase witty little boxes and bins so I could put all my coordinating supplies in them and place them jauntily so.

It's a wee early today and I haven't yet had my morning coffee, which could explain my bitterness above!

I have to agree with the Crafter Culture handbook. I'm unlikely to purchase a book where 80% of the projects are either available on the web or something very close to it. Instead, I prefer to be inspired. I'd like to see a book with absolutely no projects, but instead, spends a day chronicling one of my heroes (so many! Alicia Paulson, Sally Shim, Heather Bailey, sfgirlbythe bay, etc) and shows their studios, their work methods, their inspiration, etc. Even their thought processes when creating.

I love your reviews! Thanks for the add.

[Crafty Minx]

One of my friends got VERY into April Cornell like 7 or 8 years ago, and I gained some appreciation for the AC stuff of the time (which had some cool prints). But I felt like I would have to wear it with docs on my feet and with hair dyed the same color as the dress to not feel like I was turning into a suburban zombie in it. My friend was different, she's very NY, she could pull it off and have it look like vintage clothing, not so staid as it would have looked on me.

And I agree with just about everything you said about Jo Packham's books. My craft supplies lived, for a long time, in about $75 worth of stackable plastic rolling 3-drawer carts. The only reason they don't live there now is that one of the drawers got broken when I moved, and the carts themselves are in what has turned out to be an inconvenient part of the house.

I'm glad someone likes the reviews! They tend to take me forever to do. I'm rescuing some from my old blog lately, and each of those probably took me like 6 hours. If you check my archives in a week I should have filled in a lot more material. The most tedious thing is giving the reviews their proper date, because Vox makes you scroll back through monthly calendar pages.

I like that Lotta Jansdotter book, but I tend to shy away from talking too much about books that seem to be getting advertorial blurbs on other blogs, unless I really really hate the book. I probably will review Craftivity - not because I hate it, but because it's a strange book, and I haven't seen any blog reviews that really talk about it aside from "oh it's so great." It has some really cool stuff in it, some really stupid stuff, some stuff that could have better processes, some stuff that even though there's a tutorial, it's still way too difficult for most people, and great photography.