This complete, step-by-step illustrated guide offers teachers 30 easy-to-do art projects using readily available materials. The project, from around the world, comes complete with cultural background information and extension activities.

Information about the history of paper and its uses accompanies instructions for making different types of papers and objects such as flowers, trays, lanterns, and more from paper.

"Spring is a season of celebration! Join the fun with thirteen festive crafts that celebrate holidays from around the world. Create a colorful wall hanging for the Hindu holiday Holi. Plant a garden to commemorate Earth Day. It's always the season for crafting!"--

Articles crafted from lacquer, silk, cotton, paper, ceramics, and iron were central to daily life in early modern Japan. They were powerful carriers of knowledge, sociality, and identity, and their facture was a matter of serious concern among makers and consumers alike. In this innovative study, Christine M. E. Guth offers a holistic framework for appreciating the crafts produced in the city and countryside, by celebrity and unknown makers, between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Her study throws into relief the confluence of often overlooked forces that contributed to Japan’s diverse, dynamic, and aesthetically sophisticated artifactual culture. By bringing into dialogue key issues such as natural resources and their management, media representations, gender and workshop organization, embodied knowledge, and innovation, she invites readers to think about Japanese crafts as emerging from cooperative yet competitive expressive environments involving both human and nonhuman forces. A focus on the material, sociological, physiological, and technical aspects of making practices adds to our understanding of early modern crafts by revealing underlying patterns of thought and action within the wider culture of the times.

Are we aware of the values of craft? In this edited volume, cultural economists, researchers and professionals provide an interdisciplinary discussion of the relevance and contribution of the craft sector to the economy, as well as to society at large. Mignosa and Kotipalli bring together contributors to compare the craft sector across countries, analysing the role of institutions, educational bodies, organisations and market structure in its evolution and perception. The Western approach to craft and its subordinate position to the arts is contrasted with the prestige of craftmanship in Eastern countries, while the differing ways that craft has attracted the attention of policy agencies, museums, designers and private institutions across regions is also analysed. This volume is vital reading to those interested in the economic features of craft and craftsmanship around the world, as well as for those interested in the importance of policy in bringing about effective sustainable development.

Dormer presents a series of lively, clearly argued discussions about the relevance of handicraft in a world whose aesthetics and design are largely determined by technology. The question of computer aided design in craft is also addressed.

Shows how to use discarded packaging, such as aluminum foil and cans, cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and bottles, to create toys, pots for plants, and decorative art.

Much like the United States, Canada is a nation that’s home to many different kinds of peoples and cultures. Canada is known as a wintery country, and Quebec has one of the largest winter festivals in the world! But there’s much more to Canada than just winter fun. This volume takes readers on an exciting tour of Canada’s colorful history. The fact-filled text explores customs and crafts that show readers firsthand what it’s like to be Canadian. Vibrant photographs of Canadian people, places, food, and icons are paired with accessible, step-by-step instructions for making a host of Canada’s cultural crafts, including a Mountie hat, a Canadian flag, and even traditional Inuit crafts!

For more than a millennium, the fox has been a ubiquitous figure at the margins of the Japanese collective imagination. In the writings of the nobility and the motifs of popular literature, the fox is known as a shapeshifter, able to assume various forms in order to deceive others. Focusing on recurring themes of transformation and duplicity in folklore, theology, and court and village practice, The Fox's Craft explores the meanings and uses of shapeshifter fox imagery in Japanese history. Michael Bathgate finds that the shapeshifting powers of the fox make it a surprisingly fundamental symbol in the discourse of elite and folk alike, and a key component in formulations of marriage and human identity, religious knowledge, and the power of money. The symbol of the shapeshifter fox thus provides a vantage point from which to understand the social practice of signification.