Need inspiration?

I love books. Yes, I look at blogs but for me, nothing beats a book. This is one shelf above my workdesk. There are books on Marimekko, Florence Broadhurst, Lucienne Day, art deco textiles, Frank Carpay, textile history, textile science, contemporary NZ textile artists, embroidery and handicraft techniques and much more. I share my home with three other avid readers so we have a lot of books. But even then I'm not satisfied.

I have a page in my notebook and a document on my computer listing books I want to track down and read. Some I look for in bookshops, some I stalk on TradeMe, some I drop hints about until they turn up as birthday presents, but many, many others I find at my local library. How great is that! And then next to them on the shelf I find other books, just as good, that I'd never heard of.

Here in Christchurch we are incredibly lucky to have a superb network of council run public libraries. Now I know that within every library there are people who carefully decide how the collection (books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, databases etc) budget gets spent. Once upon a time, in a library far, far away, I was one of those people.

In my opinion, the people at Christchurch City Libraries making the buying decisions in the areas of craft, textiles, fibre arts and contemporary textile design are doing an astonishingly good job.

So if you are having trouble deciding on a project to use up a treasured piece of fabric in your stash, or if you leave Stash reHash with a big pile of fabric, yarn and craft supplies and need inspiration for how to use it, head to the library.