My All Time Favorite Crafty Books

I enjoy this book (mainly because I'm such a scrapbooking fanatic). But also because it's a helpful tool in understanding just how to put patterned paper to good use. Lots of sketches help you to see the basic design elements of each page. A great resource!

This little book contains "Over 1100 Color Combinations, CMYK and RGB Formulas, for Print and Web Media." Can you see why I like it? It's incredibly handy! I also like the way this book is organized, with the color combos organized into little families. There are 2-color, 3-color and 4-color combos. So many ideas! A very helpful guide.

Becky Higgins is the Scrap-Sketch Queen and her second book is another "must have" for me, although it doesn't rank as high for me as Volume 1 does. It's still a great resource, though and I do recommend it for your own collection.

Okay, okay--you can tell by now that I'm a major scrapping fanatic. This book is a handy resource for scrap-lifting (copying another person's layout) because it's chock full of so many great ideas. It's a favorite!

I bought this book on a whim and I was very pleased to discover that the promising subtitle ("Unlocking the Secrets to Great Page Design") was really what this book is all about! Many design principles are explained for those of us who don't have a background in the graphic arts. Such a handy tool!

This is another great idea book! Cathy Zielske not only supplied all the layouts for this book, she also writes in a very engaging manner. This is the only scrapbook related book that I can say I've read cover to cover. Good stuff!

The 200 page designs in this book appeal to me because of their beautiful simplicity. This is just as good as Becky Higgins' Sketches books are in this way! And the title "Baby's Cherished Moments" is almost a misnomer. There seem to me to be more pages and pictures of cute little toddlers than babies! But I digress... it's still one of my favorite books for inspiration.

Here we are! A book that's not about scrapbooking (but it's still about paper--ha!). I fell in love with Anna Corba's style when I first saw this book. I then got myself a copy of the "Create with the Designers" version of this book, which came with a DVD of Anna teaching many little tips, tricks and full-length projects. I can't pick which is my favorite, because they are different, so I'll list both (a two-for-one deal!).

Now considered "Volume One," I think that Becky's first Sketches book was the better of the two. While scrapbooking tastes have changed, there's still a lot of gold to be found in the bare bones sketches found in each chapter. If you were to choose between the two books, I'd suggest you purchase this one, even if it was published in 2003 (which in the scrapping word means that it's ancient!).

Heidi Swapp promises a lot with a title like this. And I was skeptical (not that she wouldn't do a fabulous job of trying to convince me, but that I would actually come to love my own handwriting). Well, seeing that this book is Number 1 on my list, you can probably guess... she did it! She convinced me that I should love my handwriting and I've been using it on my scrapbook pages ever since! This book is terrific, full of motivation and fun exercises, even the very tools you need are included! If you've been thinking about this book, let me tell you: GET IT! You will love using it!