Customer Reviews

The Craft & Art of Bamboo: 30 Elegant Projects to make for Home and Garden

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

I took this book out of the library purely out of curiousity. We're doing a lot of home improvements, and our once-indoor pot of bamboo got big enough that it had to be moved into the atrium. Since bamboo is a renewable resource... hey, how could we put it all to use?

The Craft & Art of Bamboo is subtitled "30 elegant projects to make for home and garden" but it provides a little more than I expected. If you haven't worked with bamboo before (and I certainly haven't), two of it chapters (harvesting, purchasing and preparing bamboo; and tools, materials, and techniques) probably make this worth the purchase price.

Most of the projects are small scale, geared for beginners who just want to complete something in a weekend -- a bamboo doormat, sushi trays, teppo screen -- though there are a few big projects, such as coffee tables and fences. If you're a purist, you'll be offended by the author's use of drywall screws rather than cordage, but he does talk quite a bit about lashing and show the traditional ties, complete with illustrations and a photo of the result.

If I were serious about "woodworking" with bamboo, this probably wouldn't be the only book I acquired. Because of the tools and materials section, it would, however, be one I'd enjoy having in my library.

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.

this is a great book.if your interested in building with bamboo,get this.lots of info and list of suppliers.

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!

This excellent publication provides detailed instructions and guidance for thirty projects for your garden and home. Highly recommended.

this book is great for us! we live with bamboo all around and all that everyone wanted to do was chop it down or shove it away. with this book, everyone has realized what a great resource bamboo is and everyone agrees that the projects in the book are awesome!

I checked this book out from the local library recently and was so impressed with its creative and informative approach to using bamboo in all sorts of ways that I ordered a copy to give to a friend who has a large stand of bamboo in her yard. The photos are inspiring and it covers both practical uses and more whimsical, artistic ones as well. Great book! I highly recommend it to those who wish to convert this fast-growing, versatile plant into something both beautiful and functional.

The book is beautiful. Lots of great ideas & instruction. I was really looking for smaller bamboo projects & most of this book is for large items such as fences & furniture etc. Still a great book if those are the projects you're wanting to make.