Customer Reviews

Hippie Crafts: Creating a Hip New Look Using Groovy '60s Crafts

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I just got this book yesterday, and have already finished reading all of the information inside. It has great craft projects, incredible information about the hippie era, and I would recommend this book to anyone interested in hippie crafts, or anyone who wants to know about a hippie's hobbies.

Great photos and ideas to make simple crafts. I was born in the late 1960's and remember making macrame crafts in school in the 1970's.

Also a plus is a brief explanation to the cultural climate of what was going on in the 60's....from clothes, commune living, and even the health food industry that was founded by the Hippies.

This book is a great refresher to those that lived through those times, and those who are in their twenties and just discovering what Hippies were about.

I'm not reviewing the crafts but the history sections of the book. There are many mistakes and untruths to be found throughout.
The author defines LSD as " a NARCOTIC drug." The dictionary definition of narcotic: "any of a class of substances that blunt the senses, as opium, morphine, belladonna, and alcohol, that in large quantities produce euphoria, stupor, or coma, that when used constantly can cause habituation or addiction, and that are used in medicine to relieve pain, cause sedation, and induce sleep." Anyone who knows anything knows that acid is not a narcotic drug.
The author can't get Timothy Leary's famous dictum right: "Turn on, tune in, drop out" turns into "Tune in, turn on, drop out" and the meaning of the phrase is altered significantly.
The author sites Neal Cassady as a beat writer like Jack Kerouac, when Cassady was merely the inspiration for Kerouac's character Dean Moriarty in his famous beat novel "On the Road".
The author sites Cassady as the chief of the Merry Pranksters, when everyone knows it was novelist Ken Kesey. The author then continues with (paraphrased) "Cassady and his Merry Pranksters held an Acid Test in which they put acid in the FOOD and beverageS (actually only a barrel or barrels of Kool Aid were spiked at the tests), and to those looking on, these drugged people were babbling incoherently, sometimes injuring themselves, and even killing themselves because of it." Outrageous! BABBLING INCOHERENTLY? INJURING AND KILLING THEMSELVES? - MISINFORMATION!
It wasn't and isn't about fashion anyway. I find this book to be absolutely horrendous.

awesome craft projects. so why only four stars? why is it neccessary to put a section on how great all the drug usage in the sixties was? I wanted so much to buy this book for my 12 year old daughter because I know she would really enjoy the projects but I just could not in good conscience get her a book with a chapter on drug usage like it was this wonderful cultural phenomenon.