If scrapbooking is not your bag, you might prefer Sherri Haab’s Designer Style Handbags. One thing a woman can always use is another purse, and as Haab notes, making your own designer handbags is inexpensive and provides a means of artistic expression as well as function. Her book has three main sections: Getting Started, Sew Easy Bags and No-Sew and Embellished Bags. Getting Started guides you through chapters like Choosing Fabrics, Basic Tools and Closures and Fasteners. Sew Easy Bags takes you step-by-step through the creation of several handbags from the classic fabric tote to the glam evening bag, with large, clear photos and text demonstrating and explaining each point. The last section contains two of my personal favorites, the cigar box purse and the altered book purse. The first is self-explanatory add a handle and your own creative touches to a cigar box and voila! a funky, sturdy box bag. The second makes use of the outside covers on old cloth-bound books. The pages are replaced with a fabric insert. Handles and any desired decorations are added and you’re ready to book it to your next appointment (without breaking your pocketbook!).

Billed as the most complete guide to scrapbooking ever published, Encyclopedia of Scrapbooking, edited by Tracy White, has page after page of eye-appealing photos from actual scrapbooks in addition to step-by-step instructions for creating your own beautiful memory book pages. If you’re a beginner, you may want to skip ahead to the chapters on mini books, gift albums and cards. These are smaller, relatively quick projects, but they can get you started working with the materials and techniques described throughout the book and used in more ambitious scrapbooking projects.

Many seemingly difficult techniques are demystified here, such as transferring images to a variety of surfaces including fabric, cardstock, tags and mica and creating dimensional effects with special glues and glazes. Weddings, anniversaries, a summer vacation, prom night and, of course, the early stages of a child’s life, can all be chronicled creatively in the pages of a scrapbook, with memorabilia and whimsy complementing the photos. According to the Encyclopedia, the popularity of scrapbooks dates to the 1800s. Author Mark Twain got involved in the trend when he invented a product called Mark Twain’s Adhesive Scrapbook, which had prepasted pages. We may live in more hectic times, but we can still capture our special moments by preserving them in scrapbooks.

In the world of college athletics, professional sports or even NASCAR racing, rivalries are a ubiquitous, even pervasive, part of the game. Yankees fans don’t necessarily go in for Red Sox diehards, and University of Alabama fanatics aren’t likely to chat it up with Auburn University loyalists. Common ground can be scarce. However, according to The Ultimate Tailgater’s Handbook, edited by Stephen Linn, it does exist; one need only look toward the parking lots and sidewalks of today’s stadiums and arenas to find it. As Linn so eloquently notes, the tailgate is a unifier, bringing together the very American noble spirit of adventure, as well as the twin loves of healthy competition and the All-U-Can-Eat buffet. Part guidebook, part celebratory treatise on fully mobile, vehicle-based cuisine, The Ultimate Tailgater’s Handbook is a comprehensive look at what it means to tailgate in today’s world. Along with a brief history (the first tailgate most likely took place in 1869 before the Rutgers/Princeton football game) and several fun facts (one survey revealed that 30 percent of tailgaters never set foot in the stadium ), there are illustrations on what to wear, checklists of what to bring, recipes on what to cook, and diagrams of how to set it all up. There’s even a lengthy debate on the ever-present question of gas versus charcoal grilling.

In essence, the Tailgater’s Handbook won’t leave you looking like an amateur when you’re ready to entertain come game-time. Nashville-based writer Lacey Galbraith admits to being one of the 30 percent who rarely make it inside the stadium.