The Best Crafting, DIY and Hobby Books to Buy or Gift

Annie Sloan’s DIY furniture painting guide will help you choose colors, paint your furniture pieces and then add a variety of textures. Turn your whole house into a colorful masterpiece.

This two-part guide will help you successfully cultivate and care for your plants while also using them as living decor.

Bari J. Ackerman is an artist, interior designer and author of Bloom Wild: A Free-Spirited Guide to Decorating With Floral Patterns. Her book walks aspiring maximalist decorators through finding their floral vibe and selecting patterns and textiles to use in their homes.

Reclaim old wooden furniture and convert it into functional pieces for your home with Hester van Overbeek’s step-by-step instructions for unique furniture to use in every room in your house.

Make your house a home when you follow Christiane Myers’ room-by-room guide to making your house a cozy, welcoming retreat.

Contemporary Crochet: 35 Super-Easy Garments and Accessories is Liv Huffman's debut book full of beginning crochet patterns for hats, scarves, tops, dresses and pants. Huffman wrote her book following the viral success of her crochet cardigan on TikTok.

Amigurumi can include everyday items, and Jennifer Santos’s guide includes objects such as popsicles, french fry boxes and other common objects that are absolutely adorable as crocheted baubles.

If you love flowers but can’t seem to keep them alive, you can always crochet your own. This crochet plant guide includes instructions to make your own daffodils, strawberries, seasonal branches, wreaths, mistletoe and more.

Brioche knitting creates a ribbed effect that some knitters find intimidating, but Lesley Anne Robinson’s cheerful guide will have you creating bold brioche sweaters, scarves and hats in no time.

Learn how to crochet in three distinct patterns — Tapestry, Intarsia and Fair Isle — and create intricate multicolor designs on blankets, sweaters and more.

Grab your knitting needles and binge watch some TV as you let the calm, repetitive motion of knitting relax your mind and create a variety of accessories and handmade home decor.

Between the shipping boxes, mail cartons, paper towel rolls and cereal boxes, our homes are overflowing with cardboard. Before it goes out with the recycling, learn how to repurpose it into props and forts to stimulate your child’s imagination. You might just find yourself in the copilot’s seat in a cardboard rocket bound for mars.

Celebrate all the ways our hair is different and beautiful with more than 60 yarn-art activities that include chances for your kids to practice braiding, gluing, cutting and other fine motor skills.

The best kinds of crafts for kids are the ones with minimal prep work and easy clean up. Get this complete guide to projects your family can complete with a few craft supplies and a few minutes.

Encourage your baby’s motor skills with 65 activities to enrich their learning.

We all know about baking soda-and-vinegar volcanoes, but keep your budding scientist busy with 100 other easy science experiments for kids.

This is a fun book for kids and parents who like to do art projects together. It’s also a great gift for teachers. The book introduces young artists ages 6 and up to key masterpieces and classic techniques so they can create their own interpretations of great works of art. Projects include: using plaster to recreate a cave painting, using cardboard and coat hangers to design a mobile sculpture, building a dramatic jungle scene inside a shoebox and many more engaging, hands-on projects.

Celebrate drag and everything LGBTQIA+ with this sassy cross-stitch pattern book. The 25 easy-to-read patterns include a fabulous drag queen, platform shoes and a friendly weather forecast: queer skies ahead.

It’s a sampler, but make it activism. This book of 40 patterns lets you express your disdain for the patriarchy and your support of women in adorable cross-stitch designs.

Cross-stitch goes macabre with patterns and tips for beginners from Lindsay Swearingen's new book.

Get started on your felting journey with this beginner’s guide to needle felting tiny dioramas, people, animals and plants.

This is definitely not your grandmother’s embroidery — this embroidery guide is light on florals and heavy on sass. Inside the book, you’ll find fun and rebellious patterns as well as some sweet and pretty designs. This book explains basic embroidery stitches and more complex ones; step-by-step illustrations make it easy.

Explore personal transformation through the stitching of dreams and intentions. Anything but ordinary, "Mystical Stitches" combines the beloved and accessible craft of embroidery with a spiritual element, introducing a rich treasury of 200 magical symbols you can use to set an intention and create personal icons to wear or embellish items in the home. Christi Johnson offers unique patterns inspired by botanicals, animals, numbers, the cosmos, earth elements, zodiac signs and mythical beasts, for novice or well-practiced crafters to combine into talismans with personal meaning. Johnson’s folk art style is vibrant and unintimidating and provides a framework for bringing spiritual elements into physical form.

Sewists of all skill levels can get right to work making beautiful clothing with African wax fabrics. The step-by-step guide includes instructions for 25 different kinds of apparel.

Capture the beauty of the night sky with 30 different celestial watercolor projects.

Get your brush wet with 50 easy oil pastel painting projects including portraits of insects, animals, flowers and food.

See the forest and the trees in rich colors as Clare Therese Gray guides you through how to use oil pastels and how to paint scenes from a variety of nature settings.

You don’t need an art degree to sketch Amy Latta’s doodles. Grab your favorite pen and sketch book as you practice doodling plants, animals, season items and everyday objects. Don’t miss the adorable hedgehog on page 56.

Find step-by-step instructions for folding the tail of the toilet paper roll into flowers, fans, bows and more. Provide a fancy touch to your own guest bathroom or bring a puzzled smile to the next person in line in the public restroom.

You can learn how to make more than 50 paper blooms — peonies, roses, dahlia, daisies, succulents, etc. — with this how-to guide. Step-by-step instructions and templates are included with the book as well as decorating and layout ideas. Chantel Larocque is a renowned artist who has designed wedding florals and been featured in many wedding magazines.

This book is perfect for anyone interested in learning to make stamps, prints and painted accessories. The guide’s 20 projects include instruction and beautiful photography so you can learn how to make natural vegetable dyes, cork stamps, nesting boxes, paint on glass and how to stitch together a booklet.

Build your skills and create one-of-a-kind pieces to give as gifts or use in your home. Each of the 10 projects takes you through the fundamentals of pottery work.

You don’t need to be a master artisan to carve regular bars of soap into animals, flowers and other objects in this soap carving tutorial.

Settle into a chair on the porch and spend some time whittling sticks into beautiful toys and other gifts. This book features 24 step-by-step projects including wooden chains, carved pencils and twig pencils

Get creative and get wild with plant and interior stylist Hilton Carter's latest book, Wild Creations. The beloved plant dad walks you through dozens of green projects for all skill levels to bring lush life into your own space.

Lucy Hunter encourages readers to observe the naturally occurring intricacies around them as she describes a year of cultivating her garden, making floral arrangements and taking photos.

What if you could turn the flowers you love into statement pieces for special occasions? Susan McLeary’s guide will help you turn a variety of plants into one-of-a-kind jewelry for when you need to make a splash.

Let Meghan Allen explain how to choose quality tools and prepare your polymer clay to create all kinds of unique homemade jewelry.

Learn how to string beads, wrap wire, make knots and hammer metal with this detailed step-by-step guide. There are 17 projects within the book that explain a variety of basic jewelry-making techniques. Author Courtney Legenhausen designs have been featured in numerous magazines including Cosmopolitan, Lucky and InStyle.

Demystify your new cutting machine with a series of crafts that will help you learn how to use Cricut’s design software and all its features.

Your cat is going to shed that fur anyway, so you might as well do something with it. This book contains a handful of cat fur crafts you can complete in under an hour.

This book provides step-by-step techniques for creating over 50 traditional mehndi designs. When you’ve mastered your designs and patterns, the book will show you how to incorporate them into DIY art projects like jewelry, stationery, candles and home decor.

Stuck in an artistic rut? Follow Amy Latta through a guided journal with small exercises and inspirational quotes to help you get your crafting-mojo back.