Nostalgia Time - The Golden Hands Craft Encyclopedia (part one)

Did everyone have a lovely Easter? Lots of chocolate consumed, I hope? I spent the weekend with my Dad's family, and there was a massive family outing to Bolton Abbey, the kind which requires multiple carloads of people, several bags of food and at least one dog (my brother's girlfriend's dog, Lola, obliged). I spent most of the time being towed around at high speed by my six-year-old neice and debating the possible reasons for fountains (don't ask, kid-logic is incredible). The weather has been lovely and a good time has been had by all.

You can make absolutely everything here.

But today's post is about something nice that happened to me before Easter. You see, my town has the best flea market for miles around, and while I was hunting around its many and varied stalls (seriously, you can pick up anything from a WWII army jacket to an old Gameboy, this place rocks), I found this. For £2. Two pounds, people, that is ridiculously cheap.

Does anyone remember the Golden Hands Craft Encyclopedia? I won't be surprised if you don't, it was published by Marshall Cavendish in 1975 and is therefore older than me - it was first published as a 98-part partwork and my mother collected, oh, let's say three quarters of it. I'd say about a quarter of the finished product is in this book - unfortunately not all the bits I'm missing, since my collection is missing parts throughout and this book just seems to have the first quarter. But it does have several things I didn't have, and a few pieces of information I'd been looking for for some time. Like, for example, a beginner's guide to crewel embroidery, a whole sheet of motifs that I'd had but had been ripped out of the relavent magazine and gone missing, seaweed marbling - which is that ultra-controlled marbling you see in the endpapers of expensive books, working with Japanese handmade papers - oh, yeah, and especially this.

It doesn't teach you how to make a *real* Faberge egg like the one in the picture. But close.

The collection of magazines I have shows various egg-dying and painting techniques, but this one shows egg-cutting, which was the information I was missing. For one thing, it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me to keep the contents of the egg in the shell while cutting it - now I know. But this book shows you everything from single-window cuts to those multiple-panel cuts that make the egg open up like a flower. Hmm, this will, obviously, take practice. Maybe I'll have something to show you by next Easter - the museBOT is thinking maybe we can get hold of a dremel and make a FrankenEgg.

Since I have a lot of GH Crafts magazines and their derivatives, I'm going to leave an actual review for later. In the meantime, how was your Easter? Did you do any egg-dying - or anything more complicated? Tell me in the comments!