Block

This book was bought at full purchase price, but I'd do it again. The photography is outstanding. The examples of the whole quilts excite and dare you to try your hand at creating your own. I do plan on it! I want to find more of Debra Wagner's books.

I was astonished to find this wonderful little volume when I went browsing through Amazon.com a few years ago looking for children's art books. I was surprised because my son, then 11, was complaining about the amount of Japanese art in our house, and he didn't understand what it was all about. Then I found this wonderful book! You can only imagine my surprise.

What's been neat about this small little treasure has been how it's spoken to all 3 of my children as they've grown up, and made this art so much more personal for them. Public schools these days have such tiny art/music budgets, that as parents, we have to be able to "bring art home" because they will only see it from a distance behind crowds of people at a museum. I wish there were more books like this; parents need them today.

Every now and then I take out this book, and it's like a new treasure, once again, for my younger girls (7 and 10), who always look at art books in different ways as they grow; as picture books when they're young and then as real books as they can read themselves.

This is something we'll always treasure.

Whitfield Lovell is famed for his art combining on-site drawings with found objects and other components of personal metaphor, African-American ancestry, and cultural memory. Using images from photographs of people from the 1920s and 1930s, Lovell evokes and honors an era with heavily layered narrative drawings manifesting timelessness and universality. The Art Of Whitfield Lovell is enhanced with an informative essay by Lucy Lippard and a "must" for all Lovell fans.

This book is excellent for those teachers who are tired of just giving test and quizzes. This book shows you several ways to assess the learning of you students in creative ways. For each suggestion the authors include an example for the assessment and also include lots of different styles of rubrics, so that you can choose the one thats right for you.

The author is a pediatrician, a noted speaker, and my father! His book began as a series of newspaper columns written for parents. Unlike similar titles, this compendium of parenting information is concise, relatively practical and easy to follow. You don't have to be a child psychologist to understand this advice, honed into this volume after 30 years of "practice" giving advice to thousands of families in Dr. Block's office. Recommended for first time parents, or for parents with young children who desire to chart a successful course. I turned out O.K., Dad's advice must be good!

Beaded Baltimore, Album Blocks and Quilt contains patterns for fifteen beaded mini quilt blocks, such as a flower vase, a lyre, and a cornucopia. Experienced beaders will enjoy making these quick yet attractive patterns, whereas novice beaders will find the information and instructions easy to follow successfully. Each pattern includes a chart of the color and color number of the recommended Delica beads, as well as the necessary quantity of each bead color. The supply list includes product suggestions, but neglects to include glue on the list. The instructions for starting the odd count flat peyote stitch are clear and easy to follow; however, they do not explain, nor demonstrate, how to follow the pattern after the first few rows, which may be confusing to beginner beaders.

In addition to the individual blocks, Might includes a pattern demonstrating the incorporation of four of the blocks into a mini-quilt, complete with a floral border. I also found helpful the list of, and color diagrams showing, the approximate finished block sizes when using various kinds and sizes of seed beads (e.g., each block is 1.05 by 1.4 inches when made with size 11 Delica beads). Other not specifically necessary, yet valuable, additions include a table listing the approximate number of beads per gram; a blank block pattern; and a list of mail order and online resources. Overall, I found this to be an interesting and well-produced book and would recommend it to anyone interested in a quick and beautiful project.

Review by Jo Ann Callis

Bertha Alyce is a book about a daughter/photographer's career-long intense
struggle, through photographs and video, to reconcile her relationship with
her mother. Photographing Bertha Alyce from 1973 until her death in 1991,
Gay Block has given us a book that is ultimately about redemption and
forgiveness.
This book is so rich that it makes one want to drink it in and hold on
for awhile. It is deep, troubling, and intensely human. The role of the

photographer is touching throughout: all the characters are portrayed with
compassion and identification. Myriad issues are touched on: of beauty,
desire, and class; of feminism and of women's need to be pleasing; of power
and domination; of face-lifts and strokes and whose breasts are prettier; of
women's rivalry; of mother-daughter rivalry; of the control ideology and
culture has over us. Block deals with all these issues with grace and tact.
This book is funny, like Jewish humor, often painfully so. I'm amazed that
it is all integrated without bludgeoning. Often I had to stop and look
closely to know what what Block was doing because everything is not obvious:
as a reader I was asked to make leaps which left me room to feel my own
experiences in intimate relationships.
When I say reader I'm not inferring the text is more than the pictures
because this is a book of photographs that are to be read. It is a
brilliantly laid-out, beautifully designed picture book with the text so
crucially, carefully integrated.
Both essays, by Eugenia Parry and Kathleen Howe's essays are valuable
and enrich the book.

This book does have great borders. The author includes instructions for pieced borders such as sawtooth borders, dogtooth borders, checkerboard borders and bias square borders. Oh, also flying geese borders. My favorites are the borders for log cabin quilts. Nancy calls them leftover strip borders. I also like the pieced pine tree border. It's on the cover of the book.
This book has 18 quilt projects with instructions. Many of the quilts are using novelty prints or large scale floral prints. A few are pieced or applique.
The border instructions are not too clear for beginners, but there is a fair amount of explaining the purpose of borders, and the different types of borders. The book also explains how to match up you wide-stripe fabrics used as borders.
I am thrilled about the section on timesaving techniques. One technique is about speeding up your log cabin blocks.

This book is an excellent resource for any early childhood teacher. It is also excellent for parents of children in the early childhood years. After reading The Block Book, I was able to be a more effective classroom teacher. Children began using blocks in the most amazing ways! Blocks became tools for communication and exploration. The text provides you with concrete information and suggestions making this all possible!

Our daughter, in large part due to this book, enjoyed learning about her body parts. The photographs of babies are cute and politically correct. The book is very small and very durable, perfect for tiny hands.