The Craft & Art of Bamboo: Projects for Home and Garden

Rating:
Summary: I returned it
Review: Anyone who is interested in bamboo will want The Craft & Art of Bamboo by Carol Stangler readily at hand! She looked North and South, East and West for her resources and inspirations. And she knew who to include, some of the greats in the field of working with bamboo -- among them, David Flanagan (the Bamboo Fencer), Yucatan Bamboo, and Doug Lingen and Reed Hamilton of the Bamboosmiths. The reader may not need or be attracted to each project (with 30 in all, she offers a BIG range to choose from!), but there is a great deal of information to be gleaned from each one. The chapters on harvesting and tools alone are sufficiently full of information to make the very reasonable purchase price worthwhile. This would be a great gift, for yourself or for any woodworker-crafter.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent bamboo craft book!
Review: I was given an entire truck load of bamboo and had no clue what to do with it. This book really gave me some great project ideas! Has projects for large and small bamboo... I definitely recommend this book!

Rating:
Summary: Drywall screws and cuteness
Review: This is a "craft" book, in the debased modern American meaning of "craft", i.e. useless, shoddy trinkets. All joinery is with drywall screws -- yes you read correctly -- because tying knots made the author's hands sore. Couple thousand years of artistic and technical development down the tubes, just like that. One "project" requires no drywall screws, because it consists of splitting canes to make stakes, which you can then write "carrots" or "phlox" with a marker, and jam the stake in the ground, so you don't forget what you planted. If you need a book to tell you this you're such a dork no book can help! Craft and art, my eye. There is advice like this: "Multi-paneled fences, as described in this book, are built on site. Single panel screens can be constructed off-site and then installed." What does this mean? That you can build one panel, but no more than one, off-site? Gee whiz, good thing they told me, I built all the panels in my shop but then I got the book and had to burn all but one and rebuild the rest "onsite", cuz the book said so, duh. Why is slop like this even written? To take up room so as to disguise what it lacks. Bamboo technology has gigantic dimensions -- technical, historical, and aesthetic -- which I dearly hoped to see, but this is a "craft" book, i.e. the premium is on easily constructed novelties, just like most of our material culture. Drywall screws, what an insult.

Rating:
Summary: Drywall screws and cuteness
Review: This is a "craft" book, in the debased modern American meaning of "craft", i.e. useless, shoddy trinkets. All joinery is with drywall screws -- yes you read correctly -- because tying knots made the author's hands sore. Couple thousand years of artistic and technical development down the tubes, just like that. One "project" requires no drywall screws, because it consists of splitting canes to make stakes, which you can then write "carrots" or "phlox" with a marker, and jam the stake in the ground, so you don't forget what you planted. If you need a book to tell you this you're such a dork no book can help! Craft and art, my eye. There is advice like this: "Multi-paneled fences, as described in this book, are built on site. Single panel screens can be constructed off-site and then installed." What does this mean? That you can build one panel, but no more than one, off-site? Gee whiz, good thing they told me, I built all the panels in my shop but then I got the book and had to burn all but one and rebuild the rest "onsite", cuz the book said so, duh. Why is slop like this even written? To take up room so as to disguise what it lacks. Bamboo technology has gigantic dimensions -- technical, historical, and aesthetic -- which I dearly hoped to see, but this is a "craft" book, i.e. the premium is on easily constructed novelties, just like most of our material culture. Drywall screws, what an insult.

Rating:
Summary: GREAT!!!
Review: this is a great book.if your interested in building with bamboo,get this.lots of info and list of suppliers.

Rating:
Summary: I returned it
Review: This may be the only book I ever returned. There are plenty of projects in the book, but I found only one, an occasional table, attractive enough to even consider building (well, there was a coffee table that was OK too). I really like Asian furniture and thought there might be some nice plans in this vein (it is a bamboo book!), but there aren't. I was a little disappointed.

The information on cutting, bending, and flattening bamboo is worthwhile, but I bet it was only 20 pages or so; the the rest of the book is dedicated the various projects, many of them garden/outdoors.

Overall a decent book if you've never worked with bamboo - it'll get you started - but try to leaf through it beforehand to check out the projects if you're looking for furniture plans.