Pretty Little Things by Sally Jean Alexander is an exceptionally beautiful book centering on found-object art. I've rarely seen a crafts book this beautifully put together with gorgeous photographs, fonts, and graphics all coordinated in an eye-catching way upon lavishly colored backgrounds that evoke the fine pink, blue, and beige pastels of fine stationery. (COPYRIGHT: I'm so sorry to have to put this here, but I've had trouble with online content theft. Readers are welcome to print my articles for their personal use, but I do not allow my text or photos to be copied to anyone's online site. No one may use my content without written permission from me.)
Old-style crafts books tend to give you the basics, laid out as succinctly as possible like a cookbook, enabling a student to work through a course of study with no distractions, and (when more experienced) to jump around, picking up helpful tips. This book, however, is very much a new-style crafts book that provides a lot of encouraging narrative to nurture one's inner child and spark one's creativity.
Here, the author writes a thematic paragraph in front of every project, exploring concepts such as Home-Sweet-Home for a wall-hanging project and Leap-of-Faith for a pendant. She also may be the first author I've yet run across to devote five pages of photographs and captions to documenting all the intricate decorations that adorn her home studio from crystal chandeliers and multi-drawer antique cabinets to her jar of pale blue M&Ms. It's both self-indulgent and fascinating (especially the amazing photographs).
Immediately after the studio tour, the author gets right down to business with a lesson on each of the three basic foundations of her type of found-object art: collage, glass-cutting, and soldering. Each lesson is lavishly illustrated with step-by-step, close-up photographs.
Most of us know how to collage, though the author includes some intriguing, possibly overlooked steps such as working with rubber stamps, using chalk pastels, and altering the collage's texture with sandpaper or scratching with an awl. Glass-cutting and soldering, on the other hand, can intimidate the beginner with its potential for getting cut or burned, but she includes safety tips and makes it look easy.
Once you know how to do the basics, the 28 projects follow with some variation on putting together a collage and sealing it under glass shapes that are cut and soldered together. It sounds repetitive, but it's not. The author manages to make each project unique with the addition of charms, ribbons, beads, and found objects.
About 18 of the 28 projects are obvious jewelry projects, mostly pendants but also pins and bracelets of three different types (a charm bracelet, an ID-type, and a bangle). I say "about 18" because she includes Christmas ornament projects that could easily be pendants, if that's what you wanted to do with them. The rest of the projects are things like paper weights, candle holders, and even fanciful stuff like a tiara and a magic wand.
The only project that I found off-putting and too reminiscent of clutter is her Found-Object Doll on page 115, made of a glass bottle with a metal skirt that bristles with bits of odd junk. But I loved the Wine Glass Doll on page 117 that contains beads and other trinkets in its see-through skirt made from an upended wine glass.
The author is a self-taught artist and several of her projects are absolutely breathtaking. They include the hanging Bead Dazzled Bud Vase on page 46; the She's-on-a-Pedestal found art object on page 63, featuring a 4-fold shadowbox shrine atop the stem of a martini glass; "La Maison" on page 69, a dollhouse (that has to be seen to be believed) of glass and silver furniture, featuring tiny collages; and the Life's-a-Beach pendant on page 82, which captures sand and tiny shells in a delicate glass vessel with a fancy wirework bail almost as big as the glass container itself.
In short, if you're on an extremely strict budget, you can do without this book. It's possible to learn the basics of collage, glass cutting, and soldering elsewhere and then develop your own ideas. But if you have even a little money put aside for your crafts book, this book would make a beautiful and inspirational addition to your library. It's a treat to read and re-read to jump-start your creativity. You can find it on Amazon.com here: Pretty Little Things: Collage Jewelry, Trinkets and Keepsakes
