Try your hand at contemporary fretwork scroll saw projects! Offering a modern twist on a traditional artform, this complete guide features how-to tips, a complete step-by-step tutorial, and 20 full-sized scroll saw patterns of peace signs, butterflies, flowers, mandalas, and other fresh designs to challenge your scroll saw skills. This exciting project guide will show you everything you need to know to accomplish intricate trivets, coasters, and wall plaques. Also included is insightful information on wood selection and size, blank preparation, blade selection, and more! Author Charles Hand is an accomplished designer and award-winning scroll saw artist with a love for fretwork, intarsia, segmentation, and inlay. A regular contributor to Scroll Saw Woodworking & Crafts magazine, he also sells his work to a world-wide clientele on his website, Making Dust with Charles Hand.

Now with an updated foreword by Elizabeth Day and afterword by Nigel Slater, twenty years later Toast has become a classic food memoir, detailing all the food, recipes and cooking that have marked Nigel’s passage from greedy schoolboy to great food writer. ‘Toast’ is Nigel Slater’s truly extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. Whether relating his mother’s ritual burning of the toast, his father’s dreaded Boxing Day stew or such culinary highlights of the day as Arctic Roll and Grilled Grapefruit (then considered something of a status symbol in Wolverhampton) this remarkable memoir vividly recreates daily life in sixties surburban England. His mother was a chops-and-peas sort of cook, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental AGA, a finicky little son and the asthma that was to prove fatal. His father was a honey-and-crumpets man who could occasionally go off ‘crack’ like a gun. When Nigel’s widowed father takes on a housekeeper with social aspirations and a talent in the kitchen, the following years become a heartbreaking cooking contest for his father’s affections. But as he slowly loses the battle, Nigel finds a new outlet for his culinary talents, and we witness the birth of what was to become a lifelong passion for food. Nigel’s likes and dislikes, aversions and sweet-toothed weaknesses form a fascinating and amusing backdrop to this incredibly moving and deliciously evocative memoir of childhood, adolescence and sexual awakening.

More than a fashion accessory or means to tell the time, the wristwatch has become a statement of identity; politician or celebrity, scientist or sportsman, what you choose to wear on your wrist speaks volumes about who you are. The World's Most Expensive Watches presents some of the most extravagant, intricate, collectable, decadent, or just plain interesting modern-day timepieces that sit at the top of the price spectrum. Starting at a threshold price of about $200,000, it is a trip through the last decade or so of watches whose values soar incredibly to prices of $5 million dollars or more. Additionally, there is a selection of notable watches that yielded extremely high prices at auction - many of which are historically relevant. A stunning collection that is both informative and entertaining; with detailed descriptions of individual watches and articles that usefully deconstruct the price tag with an explanation of the relevance of craftsmanship and complexity of design, as well as the importance of exclusivity, prestige and collectability. Prepare to be impressed by a larger-than-life-look at some relatively small items that command not only huge prices but kudos and respect, in all areas of a global society fascinated with using accessorising to create identity. This is the second expanded and updated edition.

Completing a project, only to discover irregular tension, untidy joins or a tight cast off can be disheartening and ruin the look of a knitted piece. Neat Knitting Techniques provides a toolkit of essential skills and solutions to common issues, helping you knit in a neater way. Step-by-step photos, diagrams and straightforward instructions illustrate each technique, and three full knitting patterns encourage you to put your skills into practice.

Regional American food culture still exists and is strongest in more rural, homogenous areas of the country. Regional foods are a major component of regional identities, and Americans make a big to-do about their home-grown favorites. The current food cultures of the major American regions-northeast/New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the West, the Midwest-and subregions are illuminated here like never before. Everyone knows something about the iconic fare of a region, such as Soul Food in the South and New England clam bakes, but with this resource readers are able to delve wider and deeper into how Americans from Alaska to Hawaii to the Amish country of the Midwest to the Eastern Seaboard sustain themselves and what their food lifestyles are today.

The unique regional food cultures that have developed according to natural resources and population are increasingly affected by social and economic trends. Increasingly mobile Americans generally have access to the same fast food and supermarket chain offerings, read the same mass market food magazines and watch the cable food shows, and younger generations may have less time to continue family food traditions such as baking the ethnic breads and desserts that their mothers did. "Regional American Food Culture" discusses the various traditions within the context of a new millennium. Narrative chapters describe the background of the regional food culture, what the primary foods are, how the food is cooked and by whom, what the typical meals are, how food is used in special occasions, and diet and health issues in the regions. A chronology, resource guide, selected bibliography, and illustrations complement the text.