The first comprehensive illustrated book on how to make colorful corn shuck dolls is finally here! Author Anne Freels is sharing her techniques after more than three decades of crafting and selling these entrancing dolls worldwide. She is known for her colorful and contemporary flair on a traditional Appalachian craft, and her work is highly collectible as both traditional and folk-art. The book contains over 200 full-color illustrations and step-by-step instructions on how to make two different styles of a traditional corn shuck doll with, of course, Anne's signature colorful style. Plus, readers receive lots of practical advice, as well as suggestions on how to personalize the dolls so their own creativity shines through. For anyone with a love of folk art and a desire to create, this book will be a treasured addition to their library.

Instructions for using cornhusks to make a variety of dolls, animals, flowers, and other accessories. Gives suggestions for using these objects for decorating or for money-making projects.

Hazel Pendley creates heirloom-quality quilts. Ed Ripley wraps bits of fur and feathers into trout flies the size of gnats. Edna Hartong still makes an item that has all but disappeared from the American scene: lye soap. All of these people, and many more like them, are Appalachians who work with their hands. Journalist Sam Venable and photographer Paul Efird spent four years combing the hills and hollows of Southern Appalachia to find these talented individuals and let them talk about their work. Mountain Hands is an intimate look at more than three dozen such craftspeople and their vocations. Venable and Efird encountered folks who pursue popular crafts, such as basketweaving and clockmaking. But they found practitioners of other trades--wallpaper hangers and rail splitters, beekeepers and gravediggers--whose work also depends upon dexterity and upon expressing a distinctive Appalachian way of life. Some are college educated, some can barely read and write; some have lived in these hills all their lives, others have only recently come to call them home. Yet each feels bound to the region through a deep sense of belonging, and each owes at least part of his or her livelihood to handwork. While most of us may think of working with one's hands as entering computer data, these individuals attest to the perseverance--and appeal--of more traditional ways. Mountain Hands is a celebration in words and photographs of gifted people who understand and appreciate the Appalachian heritage--and who live it every day. The Author: A fifth-generation southern Appalachian, Sam Venable is a newspaper columnist whose award-winning observations on daily life appear four times a week in the Knoxville News-Sentinel. A graduate of the University of Tennessee, Venable has spent most of his career roaming the highlands of his home state. He and his wife, Mary Ann, also a Tennessee native and UT graduate, live in a log house atop a wooded ridge on the outskirts of Knoxville. The Photographer: Paul Efird is a native of Rome, Georgia. He holds a degree in biology from Shorter College but has spent his professional career as a news photographer. After working for two newspapers in Georgia, he moved to Tennessee in 1990 and became a staff photographer for the News-Sentinel. Efird is an avid hiker, canoeist, and backpacker. He and his wife, Stephanie, live in Knoxville.

Born amid the exciting roaring '20s, Orva Lee's childhood was far from charmed, and being the sixth of ten children of humble parentage made for some harsh times growing up during the depression years of the 1930s. But in this endearing tale, Branch Water Children, the author, Orva Lee McCarson Warren, describes those turbulent times through a wondrous perspective-though the eyes of an innocent child. You'll come to know the whole McCarson Clan: her forefathers who came from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and England; her five brothers and four sisters; and the ones in between who fought in the American Civil War. As you read Branch Water Children, Orva Lee will take you back to your own childhood; to a time when simplicity and innocence, trust and unconditional love surrounded you as sure as the mountains surrounded the valley Orva Lee grew up as a child. You'll enjoy this wonderful story of survival of a family bound together by a proud heritage, a loving concern for one another, a fear and respect of God, an awareness and love of nature, simple living, and sheer hard work.