Provides instructions for more than one hundred handicraft projects that can be completed in an evening or a weekend.

Presents a variety of craft projects for holidays such as Valentine's, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Includes patterns.

Combines History With Step-By-Step Instruction For Every Type Of Traditional American Needlework.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.

Lorraine uses five substantially different kinds of dough to work her 60 various designs. The familiar flour/salt dough is coaxed into a wide array of decorative pieces: bowls and baskets, candleholders, centerpieces and wall plaques - including a Pennsylvania Dutch-style plaque with tulips and hearts in bright primary colors. A bread/glue dough, which requires no baking and dries to a fine finish, is fashioned into a series of wonderful miniatures like the doll-sized vegetables adorning a kitchen memo board. Lorraine uses a sugar paste concoction in ways no one has dreamed of before. Her set of fragile, lacy ornaments is exactly suited to the delicate sugar paste dough, as is a lovely vase in frosty tints of pink, blue, lavendar and green. A standard cookie-dough recipe and cookie-cutter shapes lend themselves to some fabulous decorated holiday cookies, while a spicy gingerbread dough becomes a dream of a gingerbread house, its roof studded with hearts and windows outlined with candy canes.

Incorporates handicraft projects in needleworking, electronics, woodworking, toy-making, fence-building, and a myriad of other practical and decorative crafts.

"A fascinating history of…[a craft] that preceded and made possible civilization itself." —New York Times Book Review New discoveries about the textile arts reveal women's unexpectedly influential role in ancient societies. Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture. Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods—methods she herself helped to fashion. In a "brilliantly original book" (Katha Pollitt, Washington Post Book World), she argues that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient world, with their own industry: fabric.