This attractive new title in the Take a... series presents 16 original projects for your home and garden created with bandanas. Available in an array of colours and patterns, the timeless bandana can create a striking design statement when upcycled and transformed into these eye-catching and practical makes. The projects fall into four main sections: Outside entertaining, In the workroom, In the Bedroom and Out and about. Anyone who is new to sewing need not worry. All the basic techniques and know-how are explained, with clear step-by-step instructions and pictures.

Winner of the Christopher Award An ILA-CBC Children’s Choices Book A NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Book Welles Crowther did not see himself as hero. He was just an ordinary kid who played sports, volunteered at his local fire department, and eventually headed off to college and then Wall Street to start a career. Throughout it all, he always kept a red bandanna in his pocket, a gift from his father. On September 11, 2001, Welles was working on the 104th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center when the Twin Towers were attacked. That day, Welles made a fearless choice and in doing so, saved many lives. The survivors didn’t know his name, but one of them remembered a single detail clearly: the man was wearing a red bandanna. Welles Crowther was a hero. Award-winning ESPN reporter Tom Rinaldi brings Welles's inspirational story of selflessness and compassion to life in this accessible young readers’ adaptation of his New York Times bestselling book. This powerful story of making a difference through our actions is perfect for helping the post-9/11 generation understand the meaning of this historic day through the eyes of one young man. “Rinaldi’s young reader edition of his award-winning adult story puts a face on that day (9/11), a hero’s face, and brings to young people someone who stood brave in the toughest of times and who, in the end, was lost doing his best to help others survive.”—VOYA

When Welles Crowther was a young boy, his father gave him a red bandanna, which he always carried with him. On September 11, 2001, Welles Remy Crowther saved numerous people from the upper floors of the World Trade Center South Tower. "The Man in the Red Bandanna" recounts and celebrates his heroism on that day. Welles' story carries an inspirational message that will resonate with adults as well as young children.

In the spring of 1896, Rachael, just shy of her twentieth birthday, boards a train destined to a remote cattle ranch in Oregon for a prearranged employment position. An arrangement made by a guilt-ridden wife who could no longer tolerate her husband's forceful adulterous actions upon their young housemaid. Seizing the opportunity of his wife's intervention, he demands that Rachael take his two young illegitimate children with her on her journey west; if she wants her father to remain alive. Traveling west from Brockport, New York, Rachael undertakes her first assignment from her new boss, the ranch owner. She will be required to transact business in a man's world by overseeing the loading of supplies and freight along the train route. Her third business stop, Rock Springs, Wyoming, brings her face to face with four members of her new employer, three brothers and the ranch foreman. Overwhelmed, she unconsciously turns to one brother for security, beginning his commitment to her.During the next decade of hard work, Rachael struggles to bury her past. Her new family, the Prestons and their bunkhouse crew, give her an optimistic appreciation of life as she learns there are no social boundaries in the West. By including her in all the daily trials and tribulations of ranch life, cattle roundups, hunting, procuring and preserving their food supply, expanding families, and celebrating holidays, Rachael learns to live and trust again. She receives her second chance.

From Ann Packer, author of the New York Times best-selling novels The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words, a collection of burnished, emotionally searing stories, framed by two unforgettable linked narratives that express the transformation of a single family over the course of a lifetime. A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother’s wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy—and vulnerability—of fatherhood. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex. Ann Packer is one of our most talented archivists of family life, with its hidden crevasses and unforeseeable perils, and in these stories she explores the moral predicaments that define our social and emotional lives, the frailty of ordinary grace, and the ways in which we are shattered and remade by loss. With Swim Back to Me, she delivers shimmering psychological precision, unfailing intelligence, and page-turning drama: her most enticing work yet.

"Sloane Jacobsen is the most powerful trend forecaster in the world ... and global fashion, lifestyle, and tech companies pay to hear her opinions about the future. Her recent forecasts on the family are unwavering: the world is overpopulated, and with unemployment, college costs, and food prices all on the rise, having children is an extravagant indulgence. So it's no surprise when the tech giant Mammoth hires Sloane to lead their groundbreaking annual conference, celebrating the voluntarily childless. But not far into her contract, Sloane begins to sense the undeniable signs of a movement against electronics that will see people embracing compassion, empathy, and 'in-personism' again"--

With humor, wisdom and tenderness, Ann Packer offers ten short stories about women and men--wives and husbands, sisters and brothers, daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, friends, and lovers--who discover that life's greatest surprises may be found in that which is most familiar. In the title story, on the anniversary of their father's suicide a young woman discovers that her brother may have found a "reason for living" in the love of a good woman. In "Nerves," a young man realizes that the wife he is separated from no longer loves him but that it is his own life he misses, not her. The narrator of "My Mother's Yellow Dress" is a gay man remembering his deceased mother and their vital and troubling intimacy. In "Babies"--which was included in the prestigious O. Henry anthology series --a single woman in her mid-thirties finds that everyone, including her best friend at work, is pregnant, and that their joy can only be observed, not shared. In these and six other stories, Ann Packer exhibits an unerring eye for the small ways in which people reveal themselves and for the moments in which lives may be transformed.