Handmade Home – Amanda Blake Soule

 

Another book that I've been dipping into latelyis rather different to the last: Handmade Home (or Handmade Home: Simple Ways to Repurpose Old Materials into New Family Treasures to give it its full title) is by the wonderful Amanda Blake Soule and it's kind of difficult to express just how in tune I feel with this particular book.

Many of you may be familiar with Amanda from her SouleMama blog which is on my list of daily reads. For some reason though I didn't rush out and buy this her second book as soon as it came out. I'm not too sure why, but it was indeed added to my Amazon wish list and therefore when I had a gift voucher to spend there recently it wasn't difficult to decide what to spend it on.

Handmade Home does very much what the book's longer title suggests; it looks at how to use old materials (whether they be bought second hand or passed down through generations) to make something that you family will use and treasure. Following a lovely introduction section in which Amanda talks you though where to look for fabrics and other things you may want, through to how to clean and store them and how to make crafting part of your family life, the rest of the book is given over to a number of projects. These range from bookmarks to blankets and cover a range of things in between. Most you can definitely imagine being used in a busy family home. There are some more practical ones in there like cloth diapers which makes sense in this time of being green. I'm not sure that "Women's cloth" that appears in the same section is necessarily something that I can imagine as a family treasure in years to come!

So far I've just been dipping into this book when I have five minutes or so and enjoying reading about some of the projects. The difficult bit is going to be trying to choose one and complete it before Baby C arrives (along with everything else in the to do list!) A problem that is compounded further by the post man today delivering a copy of Amy Butler's Little Stitches for Little Ones. Someone recommended this to me via Twitter after they read about my moses basket craftiness. I've only had about ten minutes to look at it so far today, but expect to hear more very soon!