Do you look at yourself now and wonder if the spark has gone out? Ignite that inner fire with the 30 engaging exercises, fun activities, inspirational images, and motivating ideas in this book. Learn what your Little Spark of creative passion looks like, how to capture it, and how to make room for it in your life. Read the book cover-to-cover and use it as a month-long creative roadmap, or just dip into the exercises as your time and inclination allow. Either way, you will change your life.

    With clear DIY instructions, Photojojo! by Amit Gupta and Kelly Jensen shows you how to turn your forgotten photos into ingenious photo projects. Do you have lots of pics of friends and family you want to show off? Make a sleek, stylish photo display rail so you can change them up at a moment’s notice. Need something to play with? Make photo slider puzzles, Rubik’s cubes, and temporary tattoos. Or spruce up your pad with a photo chandelier or a giant wall mural you can print at home! All the projects use basic materials and are easy enough to whip up in an afternoon.Once you’re armed with what you can do with all your images, check out Photojojo’s inspiring ideas to get you shooting photographs more creatively. Investigate the world from a canine perspective with the amazing doggie cam, or grab your friends and head out on a photo safari. Make a sneaky hidden jacket camera and turn string, a washer, and a screw into a monopod that fits in your pocket, MacGyver-style. Learn how to motivate yourself to take a photo every day with project 365, or get the little ones involved with Photojojo’s head-spinning photography method: because you + kid + centrifugal force = awesome. Yep, photography just became a whole lot more fun.

    Charmed Knits offers dozens of patterns for items that evoke the mystique of Harry Potter - a Wizard Robe, an Invisibility Shawl, a Quidditch Sweater, Ron's Ragg Raglan, a Clock Blanket, Harry Christmas Ornaments, and more. Easy-to-follow patterns, color photos of the finished projects, and illustrations of special stitch patterns and design elements make it easy for all knitters - from beginners to those at Mrs. Weasley's level - to work knitting magic. Charmed Knits whisks you away on a wonderful journey. Along the way, you can pick patterns inspired by the Weasleys, stock up at Diagon Alley, show your house colors, conjure up gifts, or create pieces to help you feel at home in the magical world of Harry Potter.

    But if it's hip to make squares, imagine the excitement of making circles, stars, triangles, and hexagons. Beyond the Square Crochet Motifs introduces crocheters to more than 150 designs of every size and shape. Full-color photographs capture the intricate details and color work of each motif, and clear step-by-step instructions are presented in both text and visual formats. With its unexpected range of shapes, designs, and color ideas, Beyond the Square Crochet Motifs will keep enthusiasts happy for a very long time!

    Food is instant, ready-made, and processed with unhealthy additives. Dry cleaners press shirts, delivery guys bring pizza, gardeners tend flowers, and, yes, tailors sew on those pesky buttons. But life can be much simpler, sweeter, and richer–and a lot more fun, too! As your grandmother might say, now is not the time to be careless with your money, and it actually pays to learn how to do things yourself!Practical and empowering, How to Sew a Button collects the treasured wisdom of nanas, bubbies, and grandmas from all across the country–as well as modern-day experts–and shares more than one hundred step-by-step essential tips for cooking, cleaning, gardening, and entertaining, including how to• polish your image by shining your own shoes• grow your own vegetables (and stash your bounty for the winter)• sweeten your day by making your own jam• use baking soda and vinegar to clean your house without toxic chemicals• feel beautiful by perfecting your posture• roll your own piecrust and find a slice of heaven• fold a fitted sheet to crisp perfection• waltz without stepping on any toesComplete with helpful illustrations and brimming with nostalgic charm, How to Sew a Button provides calm and comfort in uncertain times. By doing things yourself, with care and attention, you and your loved ones will feel the pleasing rewards of a job well done.

    Steffani starts with the basics, outlining two rub-off methods—tracing onto paper or draping with fabric—and explaining essential tools, materials, and sewing techniques. She then shows how to duplicate a skirt, a dress, a blouse, and a handbag, from rubbing-off the original, to creating the pattern, to cutting and sewing the new version, to making adjustments and incorporating a variety of other elements and details—not only refreshing your favorite fashions but replenishing your whole wardrobe with brand-new looks.

    Created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas, the Zentangle method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. The Beauty of Zentangle celebrates this simple but elegant new craft with hundreds of sensational one-of-a-kind designs from around the world.Selected by the editors of Design Originals, the #1 publisher of Zentangle art, this amazing collection of Zentangle-inspired masterpieces encompasses a wide range of styles. Stunning works are included from breakthrough artists and CZTs like Suzanne McNeill, Cindy Shepard, Marie Browning, Sandy Steen Bartholomew, and many more. Their inventive tangles are at the forefront of a new wave of creative expression and personal freedom.

    These images are awesome not just for their beauty alone, but because they suggest an order underlying their growth, a harmony existing in nature. What does it mean that such an order exists; how far does it extend? The Power of Limits was inspired by those simple discoveries of harmony. The author went on to investigate and measure hundreds of patterns—ancient and modern, minute and vast. His discovery, vividly illustrated here, is that certain proportions occur over and over again in all these forms. Patterns are also repeated in how things grow and are made—by the dynamic union of opposites—as demonstrated by the spirals that move in opposite directions in the growth of a plant. The joining of unity and diversity in the discipline of proportional limitations creates forms that are beautiful to us because they embody the principles of the cosmic order of which we are a part; conversely, the limitlessness of that order is revealed by the strictness of its forms. The author shows how we, as humans, are included in the universal harmony of form, and suggests that the union of complementary opposites may be a way to extend that harmony to the psychological and social realms as well.

    Urban sketching--the process of sketching on the go as a regular practice--is a hot trend in the drawing world. In this aspirational guide, French artist France Belleville-Van Stone offers motivation to move beyond the comfort zone, as well as instruction on turning rough sketches into finished work. By sharing her own creative process, which includes sketching by hand and digitally, Belleville-Van Stone emboldens readers to craft a method of their own and devote more time to art, even if it's just 10 minutes a day. "Sketch Your World" will inspire artists both established and aspiring to rethink their daily practice, sketch for the pure joy of it, and document their lives and the world around them.

    Featuring more than thirty-five of his projects, it reveals his philosophy of graphic design—how to use it to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world. Specially chosen to illustrate the breadth and reach of graphic design today, each entry demonstrates Bierut’s eclectic approach. In his entertaining voice, the artist walks us through each from start to finish, mixing historic images, preliminary drawings (including full-size reproductions of the notebooks he has maintained for more than thirty-five years), working models and rejected alternatives, as well as the finished work. Throughout, he provides insights into the creative process, his working life, his relationship with clients, and the struggles that any design professional faces in bringing innovative ideas to the world.Offering insight and inspiration for artists, designers, students, and anyone interested in how words, images, and ideas can be put together, How to provides insight to the design process of one of this century’s most renowned creative minds.

    Most deal with questions of design in a wide range of areas, from architecture and furniture, to clothes and jewellery, pottery, plumbing, and printing; others are polemics on craft education and training, and on design in general. Loos, the great cultural reformer and moralist in the history of European architecture and design was always a 'revolutionary against the revolutionaries'. With his assault on Viennese arts and crafts and his conflict with bourgeois morality, he managed to offend the whole country. His 1908 essay 'Ornament and Crime', mocked by an age in love with its accessories, has come to be recognised as a seminal work in combating the aesthetic imperialism of the turn of the century. Today Loos is recognised as one of the great masters of modern architecture.

    and stop worrying about everything being perfectly in its place.For all those who choose to live "imperfectly" with the messy things they love, this book shows how to do so creatively, happily, and with considerable style ideas from leading designers. A beautiful and inspiring volume, A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of A Misspent Life focuses on living well with everything that makes a house a home. If you have been influenced by the picturesquely cluttered studios of Pablo Picasso or Alexander Calder, or by the art- and book-filled house of Vanessa Bell, this unique style book will stimulate you with its creative ideas.This volume explores how real-life tastemakers (photographers, textile designers, fashion designers, writers, artists) integrate their life and interiors to live well with their passions, histories, conveniences, and inconveniences. In inspiring essays, Mary Randolph Carter muses on such key housekeeping concerns as clutter versus mess; open windows; and unmade beds. Combining practical tips with liberating philosophy—"Don’t scrub the soul out of your home"; "Make room for what you love"—this volume celebrates living beautifully and happily, not messily. Lavishly illustrated with intimate photographs of different living spaces, Carter exalts in the beauty of imperfection and in living perfectly in our "imperfect" homes. Life isn’t perfect—why should your house be?

    They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions, and shape our politics and beliefs. We use them to construct our relationships, to keep order in our law courts, to interpret events in our newspapers and social media. Storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human.There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story – from Joseph Campbell’s well-worn theories about myth and archetype to recent attempts to crack the ‘Bestseller Code’. But few have used a scientific approach. This is curious, for if we are to truly understand storytelling in its grandest sense, we must first come to understand the ultimate storyteller – the human brain.In this scalpel-sharp, thought-provoking book, Will Storr demonstrates how master storytellers manipulate and compel us, leading us on a journey from the Hebrew scriptures to Mr Men, from Booker Prize-winning literature to box set TV. Applying dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to the foundations of our myths and archetypes, he shows how we can use these tools to tell better stories – and make sense of our chaotic modern world.

    Choosing fabrics, cleaning china, keeping the piano in tune, making a good fire, folding a fitted sheet, setting the dining room table, keeping surfaces free of food pathogens, watering plants, removing stains -- Home Comforts addresses the meanings as well as the methods of hands -- on housekeeping to help you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to modern domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home.Further topics include: Making up a bed with hospital corners, Expert recommendations for safe food storage, Reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), Keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, Home safety and security, A summary of laws applicable to the home, including privacy, accident liability, contracts, and domestic employees and more in this practical, good-humored, historic, philosophical, even romantic, guidebook to the art of household management.--back cover

    And it's all brought to you by the DIY masters at Popular Science magazine.Four comprehensive chapters help you create megafun games and toys for the amusement of all: GEEK TOYS Be the life of any party with rad gaming hacks, amazing pyrotechnics, quirky DIY robots, "wow"-inducing projectiles, and lots of ways to make beer even better. HOME IMPROVEMENTS Pimp out your pad with a laser-security system, an improvised sous-vide cooker, and a life-size cardboard display of anyone you want. GADGET UPGRADES Want to stash a flash drive in an old cassette? Use a DIY stylus on a touchscreen? Improvise a fisheye lens for your camera? With this book, you can. THINGS THAT GO Give your motorbike a Tron vibe, deck out your car with an action-figure hood ornament, and keep gadgets charged on the go with a solar-powered backpack.