By DELANIA TRIGG, Register Staff Writer
"Nifty, Thrifty, and Kitchy Crafts, Fifty Fabulous Projects from the Fifties and Sixties" by Leah Kramer is a great book.
Even if you never try a single project, flipping through the pages is bound to bring back memories of items you might have found inside your grandma's house, things you liked to play with like those pink, crocheted toilet paper caddies in the shape of poodles.
Or those monstrous doll-face refrigerator magnets, macaroni art and things made out of neckties.
The book contains a parade of tacky treasures.
The fun part is that I am old enough to remember when people displayed these wonderful works of art in their homes.
Kramer, a crafts guru with her own Web site, craftster.com, writes that she found most of the projects in 1950s and 1960s craft books.
In most cases, she included artwork reproduced from the original sources.
And some of it is hilarious.
I got a kick out of the loin cloth project illustrated with a couple of drawings of rackish guys actually wearing the tiger-print diaper-style undies.
The tagline reads, "Gay times will be had by all with these after-shower terry cover ups!"
I laughed so hard I woke up the neighbors.
These crafts aren't just nostalgic. As Kramer points out that the projects make wonderful use of items most of us would throw away including old towels, shower curtains and burned out light bulbs.
These creative ideas also made me realize that the crafters of the past were a frugal lot.
Imagine pulling the bristles out of an old toothbrush, softening it in boiling water and fitting it to your wrist for a clever bracelet?
What about a coffee urn lamp artfully crafted from a coffee maker for a crowd (like the ones sometimes found in church fellowship halls)?
To make the lamp, Kramer removed the working parts from a bright red coffee maker and replaced them with an inexpensive lamp kit (available at Home Depot). She added a cool geometric shade and created a project that is bound to light your fire.
"Nifty, Thrifty and Kitchy Crafts" also contains directions for making accessories such as cute headbands, a cigar box purse with fringe and a scarf knitted on a simple-to-make wooden hand loom.
If you love to craft, you probably already have many of the products and tools Kramer uses for her projects.
For instance, she recommends crafters keep a supply of multi-colored acrylic paints, chenille stems, cigar boxes, craft knives, a photocopier, fusible webbing, a hot glue gun, some power tools (for drilling little holes in things), plastic gems, a sewing machine, thick white craft glue and throwaways such as tin cans, plastic bottles, tinfoil and hopelessly outdated neckties.
Following Kramer's lead, there's no end to the stuff you can make including tinfoil Christmas ornaments and a doll cake made from a cheap plastic Barbie knock-off embedded in a domed cake and dressed with up loads of butter cream frosting.
I could go on forever, but I don't have time.
I've got a yellow, ruffled toilet seat cover to make.
