Some days things just work out right. Little Miss C goes down for her nap without any problems and just as you’re about to sit down with your feet up and a cuppa the postman appears with some perfectly timed reading material. That’s exactly what happened when my review copy of Hand in Hand arrived. I’d been eying this up on amazon for a while and it was already on my wish list, so being asked to review it was an added bonus.
As soon as I opened the book I just knew I was going to love it. The simple reason being that the first section is written by Amanda Blake Soule whose SouleMama blog was probably the first that I started reading many years ago and one that I still go to everyday to see Amanda’s updates. In total this wonderful book contains sections by twenty top parenting bloggers and in each they explain what creativity and crafting means to them as well as presenting a project to work on with your children.
Reading about all these experiences in one book is wonderful and gives the reader a great overview of the different blogs that each of these women write and the creative inspiration behind them. The only problem I have with discovering new blogs is that often you want to get a feel of the person behind them and that can sometimes be hard to do without reading back through months or years of posts. This book fills the gap and helps you feel like you know what makes these women tick creatively. I’ve already discovered some lovely new blogs through this book and I’m yet to finish looking at all of them.
The projects included range from a quilt for a new baby, through to fabric ornaments and an ABC photobook for a toddler. Some of them suit older children, but many of them contain crafty ideas which could be easily adapted for children of different ages or just provide inspiration for another project. The ABC photobook idea is one which I plan to do a variant of with LMC soon to help her learn the alphabet and is incredibly simple to do. The projects in general have a very polished quality feel to them and they are very much a step up from some of the things I do with LMC at the moment.
If you enjoy craft blogs and want inspiration for projects that would work with children then this is definitely the book for you. Admittedly many of the projects may have appeared on blogs in one form or another in the past, but having them all in one place and bringing together this wonderful collection of women makes the book very worth reading.
Hand in Hand: Crafting with Kids – Jenny Doh
ISBN – 9781454702405
Price – £12.99
Publisher – Lark
Publication Date – June 2012
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of Hand in Hand to review by GMC Distribution.
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