Gorgeous Craft Books

I went to Kinokuniya Bookstore today and browsed around for an hour. I always enjoy being at the bookstores, Borders, Barnes and Nobles, independent book stores...etc. I am always amazed with the high quality books and magazines from Japan. They really pour their hearts out to get the best stuff published. You can tell if you can read Japanese, they really love what they do and they say it out loud through the words. But if you don't know the language, you still know from the pictures and layouts.

I picked up a few craft books during my visit.

Preserved flowers projects - I've always wanted to go to an Ikebana class, may be I will try with the preserved flowers first before the real thing.

Natural Handmade Goods Idea Book - It comes with 2 CD rom. One is filled with 150 clip arts and layouts. The other one is the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 trial version (For Windows only).

London Ateliers - édition PAUMES is a small and dynamic family run Japanese publishers, working in close contact with artists and designers in Europe on different editorial projects.
With a poetic and original approach, édition PAUMES explores the environments of those who stimulate the creative industries, and in doing has produced a set creative "bibles" that overflow with inspiration.

I want all these "bibles". Pretty please with cherry on top :)

While browsing through the PAUMES website, I learnt about this great rubber stamp artist, Hekisui. Crazily cute!

Finally, I signed up for 2 soap making classes. The first one will be next Tuesday. I will be making soap from scratch, learning the hot process method to make natural scented soaps. I will have lots of fun. I will take some pictures and share it here.

Enough saying...time to read now. :)