Shabby Chic: The Gift of Giving
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
Now your gifts can reflect your warm, caring thoughts and reflect the beautiful and comforting style that is Shabby Chic. Rachel Ashwell shares the wonderful gift ideas she has collected throughout the years and shows you how to express your sentiments with a classic alluring style. She shows you how to pick the perfect gift for the perfect person or occasion and then how to wrap and decorate it with style. For example, instead of giving your fashion-obsessed best friend a sweater in a box, why not put it on an old antique dressmaker's dummy? Instead of giving an impersonal holiday card from Hallmark, why not create personalized cards that fit every occasion? The Shabby Chic Gift of Giving is a perfect book for the holiday season, and it will offer year round gift giving guidance for birthdays, Valentine's Day, Christmas or Hanukkah, Mother's Day, Father's Day and other special occasions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Over the last decade, since opening a home furnishing store in Santa Monica, Calif., Ashwell (Shabby Chic; The Shabby Chic Home; etc.) has built an empire around a decorating style that involves equal parts flea-market salvaging, craft work and mix-and-matching from different ethnic cultures. In this uneven fourth book, she instructs readers on how to create striking settings for entertaining and special events. While there are some useful ideas here for anyone who wants to create a unique party on a budget for example, hanging flower-adorned thrift-store hats on the backs of chairs or mixing vintage pieces of glassware with more ordinary tumblers for a funky effect the usefulness of other do-it-yourself sections, such as a page devoted to instructions on how to make a traditional English maypole, may elude the average reader. Some might also be alienated by the celebrity sheen of other projects, which range from the makeover of a Pasadena, Calif., restaurant for Jennifer Lopez to a birthday party designed for Pamela Anderson's six-year-old son. Although this book is a bit more glitzy and produced than Ashwell's previous works, her old-fashioned yet fashionable style is appealing when she focuses on basic decorating tips. Newcomers to the shabby chic aesthetic might do better to seek out previous volumes in Ashwell's oeuvre, but confirmed fans will probably find something to enjoy in her ideas on how to transform a party space into something unusual and memorable.