Anna Elizabeth Draeger’s book Crystal Play is a treat for beaders who are captivated by the versatility of crystals in jewelry. Stitchers will explore even more combinations of crystals, new crystal shapes, seed beads, and even some new bead shapes like Tila and peanut beads. Anna showcases these crystals using techniques that include plenty of favorite stitches such as peyote, St. Petersburg chain, herringbone, and right-angle weave. But Anna also includes a few surprise alternatives, like crossweave, fringe technique, and easy wireworking. The projects include many bracelets (which readers love as they are quick and satisfying), a few necklaces, and many bonus design variations (earrings, rings, pendants). Anna’s playful, imaginative look is what truly sets this book apart!

It’s not surprising that beading has become one of the most popular crafts today — it's both inexpensive and produces decorative objects that are beautiful and enduring. For the novice or experienced beader looking for new holiday ideas, this book offers a wealth of possibilities. Drawn primarily from the pages of two of the leading magazines in the field, Beaded Ornaments for the Holidays and Beyond contains vibrant color photographs and easy instructions for making beaded ornament projects from the simple strung variety to more complex Victorian netting-style pieces. Ornamental covers, snowflake-shaped ornaments, and ornament hangers are all featured here. Most of these projects focus on pieces that can be used on a tree, wreath, or doorknob, yet with a change of color and materials any can be used year-round to decorate the home.

When Adolf Hitler seized Vienna in the Anschluss of 1938, he called the city "a pearl to which he would give a proper setting." But the setting he left behind seven years later was one of ruin and destruction--a physical, spiritual, and intellectual wasteland. Here is a grippingly narrated and heartbreaking account of the debasement of one of Europe's great cities. Thomas Weyr shows how Hitler turned Vienna from a vibrant metropolis that was the cradle of modernism into a drab provincial town. In this riveting narrative, we meet Austrian traitors like Arthur Seyss-Inquart and mass murderers like Odilo Globocnik; proconsuls like Joseph Buerckel, who hacked Austria into seven pieces, and Baldur von Schirach, who dreamed of making Vienna into a Nazi capital on the Danube--and failed miserably. More painfully, Weyr chronicles the swift destruction of a rich Jewish culture and the removal of the city's 200,000 Jews through murder, exile, and deportation. Vienna never regained the global role the city had once played. Today, Weyr concludes, only the monuments remain--beautiful but lifeless. This is not only the story of Nazi leaders but of how the Viennese themselves lived and died: those who embraced Hitler, those who resisted, and the many who merely, in the local phrase, "ran after the rabbit." The author draws on his own experiences as a child in Vienna under Nazi rule in 1938, and those of his parents and friends, plus extensive documentary research, to craft a vivid historical narrative that chillingly captures how a once-great city lost its soul under Hitler.