National Craft Month: 8 Crafts You can Learn in a Month

Embroidered Lettering

Many people think of embroidery as a 19th-century vintage craft with sayings like “home sweet home”, but with more DIYers than ever, embroidery is making a comeback in a big way! Browse through Instagram, Pinterest, and Etsy and you’ll quickly realize there are serious sewers who are reinventing this timeless craft with sassy sayings and intricate works of art.

Embroidery may seem intimidating if you are new to needlework but Author Debra Valencia recommends practicing stitches on a scrap of fabric before diving into a project. Once you’ve mastered the basics, it’s easy to customize designs with changing fabric, thread colors, or make your own patterns. Get started learning the art of embroidery with Debra’s book, Embroidered Lettering, featuring 25 projects with unlimited possibilities. You’ll be making sassy sayings before you know it!

Learn To Burn

Pyrography, or wood burning, means the “art of drawing with fire”.  The origins of pyrography are somewhat of a mystery with evidence dating back to the 1st century! Today, pyrographers are adding burnt art to all types of surfaces from wooden home decorations to leather boots. Pyrography is an inexpensive craft to break into. With a short visit to a local craft store to get your woodburning pen and wood blank, you can start burning within hours.

Take a course from award-winning artist and pyrographer Simon Easton with Learn to Burn. This book takes you from basic woodburning concepts to tips and techniques that encourage your creativity to help you develop your own individual style. His expert lessons teach you all of the essential techniques, from making simple marks to texturing, lettering, shading, and finishing. Stay tuned this year his new book, Yearn to Burn!

Extraordinary Origami

This centuries-old practice offers mindfulness while making art with your own hands. With just some paper, you can create impressive sculptures. Going as complex or as simple as the folds you did as a kid, you can make all types of animals to full elaborate scenes. If you’re interested in working with three-dimensional objects but are intimidated by wood carving or clay sculpting, paper crafting is a good start.

In Extraordinary Origami, learn from 20 American Grand Masters who share their step-by-step folding sequences and video links for each project. Origami is a great project for kids too! Craft along with your little one with Origami for Kids, a starter kit for ages 5-7 featuring 20 fascinating projects and 100 sheets of quality paper.

DO Jewelry Made Easy

Why pay for handcrafted jewelry when you can customize stylish designs for yourself? The world of jewelry making is HUGE from beaded works to metal jewelry, a beginner might think it’s hard to find their niche.  

With DO Magazine’s Jewelry Made Easy Special Issue, you can dip your toe into the world of jewelry design. From mediums such as beads, findings, wire, hemp, and leather, today’s top jewelry designers will walk you through 28 stylish sample projects. 

Leather Crafting Starter Book

Leather crafting isn’t just for leather stamping in high school shop class! Leather artisans are not only making functional art like shoes and wallets but also amazing 3D sculptures. Working with leather is actually easier than what most people think. If we are talking about small accessories, there are plenty of projects that you can start right away, without any previous experience in the craft.

The Leather Crafting Starter Book covers the basics of leather crafting, but it also goes into more advanced projects that you can make with a small leather crafting kit found at your local craft store. With this book, you can begin with easy projects for small accessories and move on to more advanced projects, like beautiful moccasins, as your skills increase.

Little Book of Whittling

For many people, “whittling” conjures up quite a colorful image. It goes something like this: a fairly old codger with longish hair, wearing bib overalls and missing about a third of his teeth, sits in an old bentwood rocker on the front porch of a very weathered cabin located somewhere up in “them thar hills”. Today, whittling is alive and well and is certainly not limited to the previous description. Whittling as a simple type of woodcarving that involves a knife as its primary instrument. People of all ages, lifestyles, and levels of experience have enjoyed trying this simple and relaxing form of carving. 

Author and world-famous whitter Chris Lubkemann takes this most basic form of woodcarving to a whole new level with 18 projects in the Little Book of Whittling, for beginners to more advanced carvers looking for a relaxing way to spend their time.