In this follow-up to Gertie’s New Book for Better Sewing, Gretchen “Gertie” Hirsch celebrates the classic casual styles that icons like Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, and Rosie the Riveter made famous—think wide-legged trousers, fitted capri pants, beach rompers, shorts, knit tops, jeans, and day dresses. In Part I, Hirsch introduces key techniques for sportswear construction—from working with knit fabrics to the intricacies of pant-making—and in Part II, she showcases a 30-plus-piece vintage-inspired casual wardrobe.

    And to help with organising the perfect party comes a very timely, and quintessentially British book "The Vintage Tea Party Book" by Angel Adoree. Angel set up the Vintage Patisserie in 2007, turning tea party dreams into reality and offering customers the complete experience, including dance, music and make up and of course a delectable menu. Her new book "The Vintage Tea Party Book" embraces the style and class of the Vintage Patisserie and illustrates how to beautifully recreate the tasty treats and classic styles of a magical golden era in your very own home with elegance and glamour and make your party go with a swing! It tells you the importance of 'occasion' and how you should make your guests feel really special. Nothing is left out, starting at the very beginning with the personalized invitation and beautiful ready made invitations to send to your friends. You can decorate your home to make it look the perfect venue for your tea party. You can collect vintage china and silver cutlery to decorate your table, and there is a tea party checklist to make sure you have all the essentials! And for that really personal touch, Angel shows how to make your own decorations, including Queen Elizabeth Union Jack flags and beautiful bird mobiles. This is not a 'cupcake' book, the menu consists of stylish, simple classics with a visual twist. Angel puts together a delicious and bespoke selection of dishes to spoil and delight your guests - whatever time of the day. With brunch dishes such as Coddled Eggs and Asparagus Egg Custards with Parmesan Wafers, to afternoon teas of Onion and Potato Flowers, Bunting Butties, Cream Cheese and Cucumber Hearts, and Lollipop and Jam Sandwiches followed by scrumptious deserts including personalised Engraved Earl Grey Truffle Hearts, Rose Pannacotta and Lemon Scones with Lavender Cream - all washed down with Green Jasmine Tea Bubbles, Saffron G&Tea Shots or a Tea Tini Flower Martini and many other delightful drinks - your guests will be spoilt for choice! Now you have the menu sorted out, it's time to decorate yourself and revel in the decadence of vintage glamour. Make your own hat and hair decorations with fabric and a multitude of decorations which can all be found at your local haberdashery, there are accessible tips on fabulous hairstyles, like how to put your hair in a victory roll, poodle or a basic set. There are makeup methods to make yourself look like a vintage beauty - like how to achieve the perfect rouged lips and put on false eye lashes. Why not play a parlour game to bring your guests together? - there are a host of games such as 'Guess the Musical Era', unconventional poker, charades and 'Are You There Moriarty?' - all of which will have your guests laughing and the conversation really flowing! Quite simply, "The Vintage Tea Party Book" has everything you need to host the perfect tea party, you will be the talk of the town and everyone will want to be invited to your special bespoke party - as well as want to host their very own!(less)

    Gain a deep understanding of the “what, why, how, when, how much” questions of your life. Become a Systems Thinker and discover how to approach your life from a completely new perspective. What is systems thinking? Put it simply, thinking about how things interact with one another. Why should this matter to you? Because you are a system. You are a part of smaller and larger systems – your community, your country, your species. Understanding your role within these systems and how these systems affect, hinder, or aid the fulfillment of your life can lead you to better answers about yourself and the world. Information is the most precious asset these days. Evaluating that information correctly is almost priceless. Systems thinkers are some of the bests in collecting and assessing information, as well as creating impactful solutions in any context. The Systems Thinker will help you to implement systems thinking at your workplace, human relations, and everyday thinking habits. Boost your observation and analytical skills to find the real triggers and influencing forces behind contemporary politics, economics, health, and education changes. Systems thinking clears your vision by teaching you not only to find the differences between the elements but also the similarities. This bi-directional analyzing ability will give you a more complex worldview, deeper understanding of problems, and thus better solutions. The car stopped because its tank is empty – so it needs gas. Easy problem, easy solution, right? But could you explain just as easily why did the price of gas raise with 5% the past month? After becoming a systems thinker, you’ll be able to answer that question just as easily. Change your thoughts, change your results. •What are the main elements, questions and methods of thinking in systems? •The most widely used systems archetypes, maps, models, and analytical methods. •Learn to identify and provide solutions even the most complex system problems. •Deepen your understanding about human motivation with systems thinking. The past fifty years brought so many changes in our lives. The world has become more interconnected than ever. Old rules can’t explain the new world anymore. But systems thinking can. Embrace systems thinking and become a master of analytical, critical, and creative thinking.

    Many of us are also teaching, even when it's not in our job descriptions. Whether it's giving a presentation, writing documentation, or creating a website or blog, we need and want to share our knowledge with other people. But if you've ever fallen asleep over a boring textbook, or fast-forwarded through a tedious e-learning exercise, you know that creating a great learning experience is harder than it seems.In Design For How People Learn, you'll discover how to use the key principles behind learning, memory, and attention to create materials that enable your audience to both gain and retain the knowledge and skills you're sharing. Using accessible visual metaphors and concrete methods and examples, Design For How People Learn will teach you how to leverage the fundamental concepts of instructional design both to improve your own learning and to engage your audience.

    This book does just that by taking you on a guided tour through the four roles of the creative process-Explorer, Artist, Judge, and Warrior.When it's time to seek out new information, adopt the mindset of an Explorer. Get off the beaten path, poke around in outside areas, and pay attention to unusual patterns.When you need to create a new idea, let the Artist in you come out. Ask what-if questions and look for hidden analogies. Break the rules and look at things backwards. Add something and take something away. Ultimately, you'll come up with an original idea.When it's time to decide if your idea is worth implementing, see yourself as a Judge. Ask what's wrong and if the timing's right. Question your assumptions and make a decision.And when you carry your idea into action, be a Warrior. Put a fire in your belly, eliminate your excuses, and do what's necessary to reach your objective.Kick provides exercises, stories, tips, and Roger von Oech's proven techniques to help you strengthen each of your own creative roles.

    This inspiring book shows you how to record your experiences, using sketchbooks, journals and photography, to create personal narratives that can form a starting point for more finished stitched-textile pieces. Acclaimed textile artist and teacher Cas Holmes, whose work is often inspired by her life and the journeys she makes, helps you find inspiration through your own life and explains how to record what you see in sketchbooks and journals, which can often become beautiful objects in themselves. She explains how you can use photography, both as documentation and as inspiration, and sometimes incorporate it into the work itself, along with found objects and ephemera. Throughout the book are useful techniques that can be harnessed to add extra interest to your work, such as methods for making layered collages, how to 'sketch' with stitch, and advice on design and colour. If you want to create beautiful, unique work inspired by your life and travels, this is the perfect book for you.

    You will find it an inspiring combination of theory, techniques, anecdotes and exercises to help you access better ideas and bigger breakthroughs.People who are good at having ideas are good at seeing connections. Could teaching people to see connections be a way to help them be more creative?Over the years, there’s a need for a book on creativity that complements the teaching of the creative process and tools and gives you a practical approach to how to enhance your innate ability to think creatively. This book as an opportunity to dispel the myth that creative talent is something possessed by a gifted minority. This is the opportunity to pass on ‘the secret’ of highly creative people to a much wider audience. It’s a chance to give others the knowledge, techniques, and training they need to enhance their own innate creativity and lead the way to fun, fulfillment, invention, innovation, and change.It’s a unique book that combines a very hands on and practical approach with a solid scholarlyfoundation.This book gives you:• Insights into how highly creative people think• The latest findings in neuroscience on connection making• Training to help you make connections others don’t• A boot camp with 21 creativity exercises

    They get out into the world, try new things, and make mistakes, and in doing so, they benefit from unexpected experiences and opportunities. Drawing on the authors’ research in human development and innovation, Fail Fast, Fail Often shows readers how to allow their enthusiasm to guide them, to act boldly, and to leverage their strengths—even if they are terrified of failure.

    A picture really can tell a thousand words. Visualization is a crucial part of the journey for companies seeking to boost enterprise agility, break down silos and increase employee and customer engage­ment. Visualizing thought processes can help break down complex problems. It empowers teams and staff to build on one another's ideas, fosters collaboration, jump-starts co-creation and boosts innovation.This book will help brush aside misconcepti­ons that may have prevented you using these techniques in your workplace. You don't need Van Gogh's artistic talent or Einstein's intelli­gence to harness the power of visual thinking and make your company more successful.With the right mindset and the simple skills this book provides you the skills to develop your own signature and style and start gene­rating change by integrating visual communi­cation into your business setting.

    Work in the spirit of the laws of attraction to visualize the life of your dreams. Follow the journey of twelve artists, each who will set a personal dream or intention. Witness the process that each artist takes, as they create a mixed-media piece that sows the seeds of their intention. Step-by-step techniques for a variety of mixed-media processes accompany each piece of finished art. Read about how their lives changed as a result and learn how to set intentions of your own using the bonus tear-out "dream-prompt" cards.

    In his classic work Frames of Mind, he undermined the common notion that intelligence is a single capacity that every human being possesses to a greater or lesser extent. Now building on the framework he developed for understanding intelligence, Gardner gives us a path breaking view of creativity, along with riveting portraits of seven figures who each reinvented an area of human endeavor. Using as a point of departure his concept of seven “intelligences,” ranging from musical intelligence to the intelligence involved in understanding oneself, Gardner examines seven extraordinary individuals—Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, Martha Graham, and Mahatma Gandhi—each an outstanding exemplar of one kind of intelligence. Understanding the nature of their disparate creative breakthroughs not only sheds light on their achievements but also helps to elucidate the “modern era”—the times that formed these creators and which they in turn helped to define. While focusing on the moment of each creator’s most significant breakthrough, Gardner discovers patterns crucial to our understanding of the creative process. Not surprisingly, Gardner believes that a single variety of creativity is a myth. But he supplies evidence that certain personality configurations and needs characterize creative individuals in our time, and that numerous commonalities color the ways in which ideas are conceived, articulated, and disseminated to the public. He notes, for example, that it almost invariably takes ten years to make the initial creative breakthrough and another ten years for subsequent breakthroughs. Creative people feature unusual combinations of intelligence and personality, and Gardner delineates the indispensable role of the circumstances in which an individual works and the crucial reactions of the surrounding group of informed peers. He finds that an essential element of the creative process is the support of caring individuals who believe in the revolutionary ideas of the creators. And he documents the fact that extraordinary creativity almost always carries with it extraordinary costs in human terms.

    Tiberghien's inventive exercises focus on the processes unique to each genre, while also offering skills applicable to any kind of writing, from authentic dialogue to masterful short-shorts. With vivid examples from literary masters such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Eduardo Galeano, May Sarton, Terry Tempest Williams, and Orhan Pamuk, One Year to a Writing Life is an essential guidebook of exercises, practical advice, and wisdom for anyone looking to embrace, explore, and implement creativity in everyday life.

    Surprisingly, many of these ideas remain unknown to most of us.     In Mindware, the world-renowned psychologist Richard Nisbett presents these ideas in clear and accessible detail, offering a tool kit for better thinking and wiser decisions. He has made a distinguished career of studying and teaching such powerful problem-solving concepts as the law of large numbers, statistical regression, cost-benefit analysis, sunk costs and opportunity costs, and causation and correlation, probing how best to teach others to use them effectively in their daily lives.      In this groundbreaking book, he shows that a course in a given field--statistics or economics, for example--often doesn't work as well as a few minutes of more practical instruction in analyzing everyday situations. Mindware shows how to reframe common problems in such a way that these powerful scientific and statistical concepts can be applied to them. The result is an enlightening and practical guide to the most powerful tools of reasoning ever developed--tools that can easily be used to make better professional, business and personal decisions.

    An invaluable resource for any manager or professional, this book offers a collection of proven, practical methods for simplifying any problem and making faster, better decisions every time.

    But what drives these idealistic types to change the world? What keeps them motivated to work tirelessly to make all of our lives better, more just, and more humane? This book is for INFJs and the people who know and love them. You'll take an in-depth look at the INFJs values, motivations, and drives. You'll discover how the INFJ approaches work, family life, and relationships, and learn how they set priorities in life. If you're an INFJ, you'll discover how to become the best person you can be. If you know an INFJ, you'll gain a true understanding of the unique character of this sensitive, humanistic personality type.