Books

Interior designer, Abigail Ahern, reveals her insider secrets in a girl friendly DIY & design book, titled A Girl's Guide To Decorating. Bright & colourful, the book offers practical solutions for revamping your home and creating stylish spaces.

Filled with tips and tricks to transform every room of the house - plan out your space, get to grips with tools, choose colours, get the most out of small rooms, light dark areas, create the illusion of depth with mirrors, and give yourself more storage space with shelving.

Whether creating a brand new room or sprucing up an old space, this book is a brilliant introduction to the world of interior design. Filled with interior eye candy, browse through hundreds of real life examples and get inspiration and ideas to use in your own home.

You can pick up a copy of the book from Quadrille now.

Betz White's latest release, Sewing Green offers 25 projects to make with natural and recycled materials, which means that you can do something good for the environment, while making something great for yourself.

The book starts with guides to working with recycled materials, thrifting for a bargain and hunting out a gem in the rough. Create a Striped Cafe Apron from an old work shirt, keep your feet warm with Recycled Sweater Slippers, create an Auto Sunshade with Caprisun packages, or give your home some outdoor charm with a Woodland Draft Buster.

The tutorials are all in depth and come with handy tips and tricks to help you along the way. Breath new life in to unwanted items and create wonderful new accessories for you, your bag and your home. 100% guilt free.

You can pick up a copy of the book from Abrams Books now.

If you were only going to buy one craft book in your life, then Martha Stewart's Encyclopedia of Crafts would probably be your best bet.

The queen of all things homely has pulled together hundreds of instructions for testing out every craft under the sun, and in this physically gigantic book, you can make hundreds of projects for feathering and decorating your nest.

The tutorials are short and sweet, without step photos, but this offers extra space for more projects to be crammed in - keep your bits and pieces organizes with a Desk Tidy, turn shells in to Salt & Pepper Holders, mold Colorful Clay Buttons, and make unique Sand Castle candles. Papercraft, mosaic, framing, jewelry making, glittering, etching, calligraphy and beading are just some of the crafts you'll find in this book, and with projects big and small, there's a suitable project for every skill level.

You can pick up a copy of the book from Random House now.

Sister Diane Gilleland, who you may know from the podcast and blog CraftyPod, has put her crafty know-how in to a new ebook, titled Making A Great Blog. As the title suggests, the book aims to teach you how to make your blog the best it can be and get the most out of writing for it.

A great DIY effort, this ebook seeks to make you see your blog in a new light and with a range of exercises and questionnaires to complete, help focus your subject and find your writing style. Emphasizing the importance of good visuals, learn how to create a clean and stylish design, put together a great header and take better photography.

Whether new to blogging or a wordy expert, this book will work as a refresher and help you recapture your zest for writing. It makes a lot of sense releasing this title as an ebook too, because who needs a physical copy when a blog is online?! Short and sweet, this is a valuable read for any blogger.

Priced at $12.50, you can pick up a copy of the eBook from CraftyPod now.

If you hated being told not to play with your food as a child, then you would have loved Face Food by Christopher D Salyers.

Turning food in to art, the Japanese technique of bento is adding a bit of fun to lunchtimes across the country. Taking inspiration from anime, animals and movies, this book is filled with awesome examples of boxes, which show why the art is so popular.

Highlights include a Spiderman rice ball, Pikachu cheese on break, a Mock Lobster made from red peppers, and yummy Powerpuff Girl heads. Each box lists the ingredients required to make the faces, so why not cutesy up your lunch box and join the face food revolution?

You can pick up a copy of the book from Mark Batty Publisher now.

Technology has never looked so cute and with Nelly Pailloux's new book, Crobots you can learn how to crochet an army of adorable robots.

The technique of amigurumi hails from Japan and you can certainly see that influence in the book with geisha, ninja and sumo robots to make. There is a cute concept behind each design, ranging from mechanabots and zombiebots, to catbots and sheepbots.

Complete with crochet patterns and assembly instructions for making 20 different robots, these would be quick knits for any skilled knitter, and would make great gifts to give away (if you could bear to let them go!)

You can pick up a copy of the book from Andrews McMeel Publishing. Check out a sample project from the book, Mechanobot.