Maureen Mills’s Surface Design for Ceramics reads like a compact manifesto for the small, concentrated art of ornamentation — not a polemic but a pedagogy: a careful, image-rich argument that the surface of a vessel is not mere decoration appended to a form but an active partner in meaning-making. Presented as one of the practical … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Surface Design for Ceramics by Maureen Mills
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Paper Objects: New Directions in Paper Art by Gene McHugh
Gene McHugh’s 500 Paper Objects performs the deceptively ambitious work of making a single, humble material speak with the variety and insistence of a chorus. Arranged as a dense visual catalogue rather than a sustained monograph, the book stages paper not as a passive substrate but as an active agent: folded, torn, cast, burned, layered, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Paper Objects: New Directions in Paper Art by Gene McHugh
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Painting and Decorating Furniture by Sheila McGraw
An attentive manual that thinks like a maker and reads like a quiet manifesto Sheila McGraw’s Painting and Decorating Furniture presents itself at first glance as a pragmatic handbook: techniques, materials, step-by-step procedures. Beneath that useful surface, however, the book stages a subtler argument about how objects participate in our lives — about the ways … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Painting and Decorating Furniture by Sheila McGraw
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
At once primer and manifesto, Good Bones, Great Pieces stakes a modest but ambitious claim: a home’s durability—its capacity to endure fashions, life changes and moves—depends less on trend-chasing than on a coherent set of flexible, well-chosen objects. Suzanne and Lauren McGrath, a mother–daughter design team steeped in editorial and television worlds, lay out that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
Tamara Maynes’ The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space is at once a manifesto for tactile domesticity and a practical handbook for anyone who wants their home to read like a lived, handcrafted archive. Maynes—who writes from the vantage of a practitioner—treats making not as a hobby but as a mode of seeing: an attentiveness to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Glass Objects – A Celebration of Functional & Sculptural Glass edited by Maurine Littleton
Maurine Littleton’s 500 Glass Objects reads less like a conventional catalogue and more like a visual anthology: a sustained argument for glass as a medium that consistently unsettles our categories — between use and display, craft and fine art, commodity and heirloom. The book’s straightforward title promises breadth; what the pages deliver is a series … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Glass Objects – A Celebration of Functional & Sculptural Glass edited by Maurine Littleton
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Metal Vessels: Contemporary Explorations of Containment, Edited by Marthe Le Van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Metal Vessels arrives like a compact anthology of the everyday and the ceremonial — a taxonomy of containment that doubles as a meditation on form, function and the material imagination. If a vessel’s primary job is to hold, this book insists that holding is never neutral: it is a cultural act, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Metal Vessels: Contemporary Explorations of Containment, Edited by Marthe Le Van
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Knives: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, Edited by Marthe Le van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Knives is at once a catalogue of craft and a meditation on form. Like other volumes in the “500” series, it trusts the visual authority of objects to make an argument: that knives—tools born of necessity—have been consistently shaped by cultural priorities, technological change, and aesthetic impulse. The book’s pleasures are … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Knives: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, Edited by Marthe Le van
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Creating the Vintage Look: 35 ways to upcycle for a stylish home by Ellie Laylock
Ellie Laylock’s Creating the Vintage Look arrives as a gentle manifesto for the second life of things. Part practical handbook, part elegy for the handcrafted object, the book stages thirty-five projects that read as short essays in material culture: each one a measured argument for keeping, altering, and celebrating the past rather than erasing it. … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Creating the Vintage Look: 35 ways to upcycle for a stylish home by Ellie Laylock
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House by Robyn Griggs Lawrence
Robyn Griggs Lawrence’s Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House is at once modest and insistent: modest in scale and encomiastic of everyday materials, insistent in its claim that the ethics and aesthetics of wabi-sabi belong not to museums or museums-of-taste but to ordinary domestic practice. The book performs a careful, corrective gesture — it reframes … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House by Robyn Griggs Lawrence
The New Renaissance Mindset 