More Pretty Books

Oh yes, I've been buying secondhand books again. This time from The Shakespeare Hospice Charity Bookshop. My son and I were in Stratford on Saturday for one of our regular theatre visits - Miss Littlewood since you ask and yes, it was very good thank-you. Anyway, we varied our normal bookshop trawl to include this shop  where I found this lovely book.

This is one of a series of nostalgic Scrapbooks compiled by Robert Opie; I've already got a couple of the others. They're huge books and each page is packed with things from his vast collection of consumer memorabilia. Here's the page on Women's magazines of the 1920s ...

Look at those lovely copies of Weldon's.

Or how about this page of toys ...

Those rather sinister looking toys in the middle are characters
from the Winnie-The-Pooh books.

There's something to appeal to everyone in these books, whether it be trains (yes Stephen, this picture's for you) ...

... or just lots of lovely old adverts ...

There are ten of these giant scrapbooks all together, covering much of the twentieth century and they're all beautiful. You can buy them new from Robert Opie's Museum of Brands which, by the way, is a great little museum. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting it a few years ago; it's absoulutely crammed full of memories.

The other book I bought at this shop isn't quite so pretty but it'll be very useful.

I bought The Quilter's Bible by Linda Clements for my daughter a few years ago and thought at the time what a comprehensive book it was for a new quilter. Now I've been quilting for a while but I mostly learned from my Mum so I was pleased to find a copy of this book for myself.

It's full of detailed information on just about every technique you could think of and has lots of inspiring pictures too. I love the section on creating the illusion of curves with straight lines.

I've made a Storm At Sea quilt (the purple design at the bottom) but my Snail Trail quilt  - that's the main picture - is languishing in a bag half-finished. 

I love pages like this one that show lots of designs from just a few simple shapes ...

You could turn any one of these into a knitted or crocheted blanket.

After the charity bookshop, we still had time to pop into the Chaucer Head Bookshop, where I found this treasure ...

This may well have been the prettiest book in the shop ... well I thought so anyway. It's 'A Medieval Miscellany' by Judith Herrin and is a collection of medieval texts and images, translated into modern English.

'A Shepherd's Duty' and 'Magic'

'Pilgrimage' and 'Travel'

As well as being beautiful, the book is a wonderful history of daily life many hundreds of years ago. I love this sort of book - history and art combined. What more could you want?