Choosing Craft explores the history and practice of American craft through the words of influential artists whose lives, work, and ideas have shaped the field. Editors Vicki Halper and Diane Douglas construct an anecdotal narrative that examines the post-World War II development of modern craft, which came of age alongside modernist painting and sculpture and was greatly influenced by them as well as by traditional and industrial practices. The anthology is organized according to four activities that ground a professional life in craft--inspiration, training, economics, and philosophy. Halper and Douglas mined a wide variety of sources for their material, including artists' published writings, letters, journal entries, exhibition statements, lecture notes, and oral histories. The detailed record they amassed reveals craft's dynamic relationships with painting, sculpture, design, industry, folk and ethnic traditions, hobby craft, and political and social movements. Collectively, these reflections form a social history of craft. Choosing Craft ultimately offers artists' writings and recollections as vital and vivid data that deserve widespread study as a primary resource for those interested in the American art form.

Transform Your Life by Changing What You Tell Yourself—It’s That Easy! Take charge of your own happiness with this nurturing, empowering compilation of positive affirmations and stories. Choosing Your Words and Crafting Your Life will encourage you to first examine your own “self-talk.” Are the conversations you have with yourself—the phrases you use to describe yourself—empowering? Constructive? Or are they negative and demeaning? This book will help you make conscious choices about how you speak to yourself. By creating powerful, positive affirmations, you can decide how you want to live, what you want to change, what you want to improve, and what you want to fully appreciate in your life. Choosing Your Words and Crafting Your Life provides the tools you need to write your own life story, along with examples of affirming statements designed to help you live a life filled with all the joy and blessings you deserve!

Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts brings together leading international artists and critics to explore the possibilities and limitations of the idea of 'sloppy craft' – craft that is messy or unfinished looking in its execution or appearance, or both. The contributors address 'sloppiness' in contemporary art and craft practices including painting, weaving, sewing and ceramics, consider the importance of traditional concepts of skill, and the implications of sloppiness for a new 21st century emphasis on inter- and postdisciplinarity, as well as for activist, performance, queer and Aboriginal practices. In addition to critical essays, the book includes a 'conversation' section in which contemporary artists and practitioners discuss challenges and opportunities of 'sloppy craft' in their practice and teaching, and an afterword by Glenn Adamson.

Apart from the sheer enjoyment of using our hands to create something new, crafting helps us to connect with who we are. Sarah Samuel casts fresh light on how the basic human need to create is often forgotten as mass-consumerism grows, and how we can all still find our unique path, craft and our own means of individual, joyful self-expression. Through personal anecdote and expert insight, this book unearths the true value of craft, and how we can meet our soul’s yearning to be creative and open ourselves up to infinite possibilities.

Ask teachers about their biggest challenges in elementary and middle school, and many will say the teaching of writing. It is often difficult for students find the joy, discovery, and satisfaction writing can yield. What Lisa Eickholdt and Patricia Vitale-Reilly have found is that adherence to genre studies can get in the way of student collaboration. Believing writing instruction should be more authentic, they want students to have more choices, develop better collaboration, and sustain a sense of community, all through the implementation of writing clubs.In their book Writing Clubs: Fostering Choice, Collaboration, and Community in the Writing Classroom , you'll discover ways to: Collaborate throughout the process of writing Choose what to write and how to write it Examine mentor texts and study craft techniques across genres Develop speaking and listening skills Celebrate classmates’ accomplishments through publication Collaboration is widely recognized as a vital life skill. Eickholdt and Vitale-Reilly present a plethora of ideas on how gratifying it can be right now, as well as in the future. There’s an old proverb that says, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.’ In Writing Clubs , we discover that there is no limit to how far young writers can go when teachers show them what it means to collaborate.

Rodney De Almeida

Introduction -- Great objectives -- Great books -- Great instruction -- Great discussions -- Great answers -- Forming a general understanding -- Developing an interpretation -- Connecting and reacting to text --Examining the content and structure of text.