Verwandte Artikel zu Homemade: The Heart and Science of Handcrafts

Homemade: The Heart and Science of Handcrafts - Hardcover

Sterbenz, Carol Endler

 
9781416547174: Homemade: The Heart and Science of Handcrafts
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1416547177 ISBN 13: 9781416547174
Verlag: Scribner, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Offering an abundance of information and inspiration, Homemade is a revelatory addition to the craft world—the ultimate reference book on crafting and also a warm, engagingly written book that combines history and personal narrative with the science that makes a craft possible and the passion that inspires it.

Carol Endler Sterbenz is a crafter, a teacher, a homemaker, a wife, and a mother. Raised by immigrant parents who taught her the enduring value of resourcefulness and creativity, she makes her lifetime of experience and infinite enthusiasm the foundation for Homemade. Sterbenz provides readers with not only practical information and direction but also a philosophy and methodology of crafting that build confidence and ability, making it easy to achieve truly professional results.

Teeming with clear, reliable, and thorough information on everything from tools and materials to techniques, Homemade is an essential guide to seven of the most beloved crafts: beading, the flower arts, paper crafting, hand printing, decoupage, decorative embellishing, and children’s arts and crafts.

Crafters—beginners and veterans alike—can turn to Homemade to learn which glues and finishes to use, how to form a perfect beaded loop, assemble a miniature robot, hollow out an egg, emboss paper, make a hand-tied bouquet, or transform a chandelier. Overflowing with hundreds of techniques; easy-to-follow step-by-step directions supported by more than eight hundred beautiful and precise hand-drawn illustrations, diagrams, and patterns; and countless insider secrets and troubleshooting tips, Homemade is an indispensable go-to reference no crafter should be without.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carol Endler Sterbenz is a well-known author, editor, and media personality. She has written more than twenty-five craft and decorating books including Pottery Barn Design Library: Storage and Display, American Country Folk Crafts, and the Instant Gratification series (Chronicle Books). A former syndicated columnist of By Hand and Primary Colors: Interiors, Ms. Sterbenz was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly magazine Handcraft Illustrated. She lives with her husband, John, in Westchester County in NY.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction


YOUNG ADMIRER: Papa Bach, how do you manage to think of all these new tunes?

J. S. BACH: My dear fellow, I have no need to think of them. I have the greatest difficulty not to step on them when I get out of bed in the morning and start moving around my room.

—Laurens van der Post,

Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1975

I’ve heard it said that a carpenter with a hammer sees nails everywhere. I say a crafter with imagination sees handcrafts everywhere. I know I do. I see sparkling bracelets in a scattering of beads, keepsake journals in sheets of handmade paper, and jointed dolls in a lump of clay. An ever-present part of my childhood, handcrafts were my playthings. They were part of my home education. I was encouraged from an early age to express my ideas freely, and I took readily to arts and crafts materials, which were supplied in abundance. I was expected to know how to embroider, draw, paint, cultivate a garden, and take care of a home with resourcefulness and discipline. Through a lifelong practice of making things by hand, I have come to understand my world and my place in it, first as a daughter of immigrant parents, then as a wife and a mother, a teacher of schoolchildren, a craft designer, and an author of books about handcrafts. Handcrafts are central to who I am; they are part of the rhythm of my everyday life.

It all began with my parents. My mother was born in Finland at the beginning of the twentieth century and spent her early childhood in Kolhola, a little village near a lake where fir trees outnumbered the people. In winter, she skied across a field to a one-room schoolhouse on finely crafted skis made by her oldest brother. There were four grades in one room. Discipline was strictly enforced. After the academic fundamentals, the girls and boys were divided into two groups. Girls were taught needlework, with more sophisticated handwork introduced as the girls got older: hand sewing and knitting in the first grade, embroidery in the second and third, and by fourth grade, using a treadle sewing machine to make a man’s dress shirt. Boys were taught woodworking and cabinetry.

After school my mother returned home to a long dwelling made of hewn logs cut from the forestland owned by her father’s family. Once inside the door, hand-loomed runners painted bands of color along the wood floor, which was made of smooth planks cleaned once a week by hand using brushes and fine sand until they were as white as birch bark. Oil lamps and lighted faggots of wood that protruded from specially made holes in the log walls were used to light the rooms during the long winter evenings. On many of these evenings my mother would sit in their glow, embroidering alphabets, geometric patterns, and simple flowers onto thick handwoven linen cloth. The thread for the cloth was spun from flax that grew in the family’s fields. On Saturdays, she would help her mother make the beds, pinching the corners of the stiff, snow-white linen into knife-sharp folds and making sure the panels embroidered with monograms were carefully positioned over the blankets.

Her mother and teachers were not the only ones who believed that children should uphold high standards in the home arts. The importance of taking pride in one’s work and avoiding idleness were enduring values of social custom that the elders of the village upheld by keeping children under their watchful eye. One summer while my mother was babysitting an infant, soothing him to sleep by pressing her foot against the rocker of a hand-carved cradle, the child’s grandfather complained that certainly she could be doing something with her hands, too. And summer was certainly the time to try an ambitious project as daylight lasted until midnight, and only heavy woolen shades made from blanket-like cloth could keep the sun from streaming through the windows. Women took advantage of the natural light to sew, knit, crochet, bake, and keep their homes scrupulously organized and well-functioning. In winter, an eerie twilight brightened the sky for only two hours around noon, after which darkness enveloped the land again and all handwork had to be done by the light of an oil lamp or on weekends after chores.

My mother left Finland when she was twelve, immigrating to Canada, and finally finding her way to New York City, where she met and married my father. Born in Dresden, Germany, to a German father and a Danish mother, my father came to America in 1933 when he was twenty-five years old. When he first arrived in New York, he and a friend opened a photography store and portrait studio on Broadway in Manhattan. When the business closed several years later, he turned his trained eye and exacting standards to carpentry, a craft which provided for his growing family.

Although his daily work as a carpenter required large power tools, planes, and rasps, his evenings and weekends were spent making small pieces of furniture and carving sculptures of figures, street scenes, and sailing ships. He would spend hours deftly wielding his gouges, chisels, files, and rifflers, one time carving a small country village that he then painted with oils and set into a frame. I watched, utterly absorbed. Enveloped in the scent of linseed oil and turpentine, I learned how to sharpen a gouge like a razor by moving the tool in a circular motion, pushing the gouge forward before easing up on the tool on the way back across a sharpening stone. I learned to mix paint, experimenting with color on the wooden lids of cigar boxes. One year my father made three wooden banks for my two sisters and me. Each bank was an architectural model of a 1940s-style cottage with a chimney through which we could drop our allowance, listening for the sharp “tink” of the coins as they landed on the rising heap of money inside.

Of the many disciplines my father introduced to me, photography was the one I pursued with the greatest interest. I loved the chemistry involved in processing film and making prints and was enthralled each time a hidden image conjured itself, ghostlike, on a sheet of photo paper. My father and I worked together in our home in Bellerose, New York, where a darkroom was built in our basement and outfitted with the professional equipment originally used in his photography store. During the many hours spent there, my father taught me about the art of photography, as well as about the tools and techniques of printing black-and-white photographs. I also learned, by my father’s example, about the importance of commitment to good workmanship, which he explained as a seamless mix of discipline and imagination. He promised that if I put time and effort into learning a skill, I would be rewarded with moments of deep satisfaction, which, in turn, would motivate me to search further for the undiscovered possibilities in the materials with which I worked. I also would discover unexpressed potential in myself and be able to produce work that was beyond my expectations. He was right, but at that time, caught in the confusing labyrinth of rules and cautions and sorting out the variables of taking good pictures and making good prints, I didn’t see that as clearly as I do now.

My father’s practical philosophy and methodical approach to photography found a complement in my mother’s approach to handcrafts. As a child I would sit next to her and practice my embroidery; I would hold a piece of linen and a threaded needle and try to sew straight lines or form the letters of the alphabet, ultimately progressing from a modest sampler to small tablecloths and pillowcases. Today, I’m keenly aware of how my mother ensured an everlasting tie between us by passing on to me the traditions she learned growing up. What stands out is her resourcefulness—like...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1416547177
ISBN 13 
9781416547174
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Zeichner
Bates Harry
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
800
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande