Button Mania

Discover how to turn buttons, bottle caps, and more into hours of fun! This next book in the Mania series is packed with creative crafts, fast projects, fun facts, and many more surprises. Projects include simple crafts that can be done with one button that might be found in a dresser drawer, and more elaborate crafts that might require a trip to the craft store, but either way hours and hours of fun is guaranteed!

Push a button and turn on the television; tap a button and get a ride; click a button and “like” something. The touch of a finger can set an appliance, a car, or a system in motion, even if the user doesn't understand the underlying mechanisms or algorithms. How did buttons become so ubiquitous? Why do people love them, loathe them, and fear them? In Power Button, Rachel Plotnick traces the origins of today's push-button society by examining how buttons have been made, distributed, used, rejected, and refashioned throughout history. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1925, when “technologies of the hand” proliferated (including typewriters, telegraphs, and fingerprinting), Plotnick describes the ways that button pushing became a means for digital command, which promised effortless, discreet, and fool-proof control. Emphasizing the doubly digital nature of button pushing—as an act of the finger and a binary activity (on/off, up/down)—Plotnick suggests that the tenets of precomputational digital command anticipate contemporary ideas of computer users. Plotnick discusses the uses of early push buttons to call servants, and the growing tensions between those who work with their hands and those who command with their fingers; automation as “automagic,” enabling command at a distance; instant gratification, and the victory of light over darkness; and early twentieth-century imaginings of a future push-button culture. Push buttons, Plotnick tells us, have demonstrated remarkable staying power, despite efforts to cast button pushers as lazy, privileged, and even dangerous.

er*go*nom*ic (er-ga-'na-mik) adj: designed to allow people and the things people use to interact in the safest, most effective, and most comfortable manner You work indoors. You're not on your feet all day and you do no heavy lifting. You have escaped from the brutal nature of most human labor. And yet at the end of the day you feel exhausted. You have vague aches and pains that you are embarrassed to mention to your doctor. If you do, the doctor gives you some equally vague advice: take it easy; don't push yourself; get more rest. If that doesn't work, maybe you're a whiner, a hypochondriac. Or maybe you're being attacked by your possessions. Perhaps you've been making do with a worn-out old mattress in the bedroom, an office chair that won't let you sit up straight, and a computer screen that you struggle to read with your bifocals. You bought a desk and a file cabinet whose colors complement each other perfectly, but you had no idea how downright irritating ordinary furniture can get if the only choice you bother with is matching style and color. Somewhere in this world is a reading light, chair, bed, perhaps even a keyboard and desk, built just for you. This book will show you how to find them.

Relates facts and information about a host of ordinary things ranging from safety pins to negligees.

A lot of people play video games. A lot of people think they have good, even great, ideas. So what happens when these two worlds collide? Well, Epiphanies, Theories, and Downright Good Thoughts... tries to answer these questions for us. The video game industry has boomed into a monster of the consumer market and though we may not realize it, this unstoppable machine has left a fingerprint on the generation that has grown up playing them. And by fingerprint, we mean a giant freaking punch. So now, only now, we are beginning to see what years of video game-playing, sitting-in-front-of-the-tv-for hours, learning-to-use-surge-protectors has done to our future. One such pioneer who survived this dangerous time is our author, J.C.L. Faltot, who takes a serious, albeit sarcastic, look into the machine that is the video game monster. How video games have helped shape the market, touched the lives of those who play them, and defined people like Faltot for the rest of his life. For better or for worse. And perhaps in many ways (as you will find along Faltot's estranged journey) it's often a little bit of both.

Two nationally acclaimed authors present the newest, hottest craft: creative embellishing with tape. It’s enough to make anyone get crafty! It’s simple, fashionable, and fun: nothing beats embellishing when you want to make a definite style statement. TV personalities Terri O (the "Craft Queen”) and Suzanne Chase, co-owner of Treasure Tape™, offer up a host of fabulous ideas for personalizing items quickly and easily. Their trick? Using double-sided tape, which takes no time at all to do--or undo, when you’re ready for a change. And the techniques are amazingly diverse, including paper mosaics, layering, fabric collage, trimming, ribbon designs, and thread effects. Anyone would go wild over the 66 individual projects--shown in more than 200 photos--for beautifying handbags and their contents; home d�c∨ clothing, shoes, and accessories; kids’ stuff; keepsakes and scrapbooks; and even office equipment. And all the information on techniques and supplies you need is right here. Suzanne Chase is co-owner of Treasure Tape™, and is the author of Instant Paper Treasures and a DVD on home decorating entitled Embellish Your World. She has appeared on HGTV, DIY, and QVC to demonstrate the world of instant embellishing. She has written articles for popular consumer craft magazines including Creating Keepsakes, Home Arts, Memories Community, and Beyond Scrapbooking. Terri O, originally crowned "the Craft Queen” some 15 years ago, is the reigning national spokesperson for the Craft & Hobby Association. She regularly appears on morning shows across the country as well as shows on HGTV, The Discovery Channel, and QVC. She is currently the host of her own show, On the Go with Terri O, which specializes in projects for busy lifestyles.

This book arises from an international conference held at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, in May 2015, and it includes papers by important Italian scholars of fashion. It is dedicated to one of the main indicators of social change, fashion, analysed within different scientific fields, historical periods, and geographical areas. This volume deals with issues of economy and fashion, copyright, industrial designs, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents, as well as new communication devices and strategies in the era of increasing globalization and market integration. Contributions analyze fashion blogs, fashion communication strategies, relations between fashion and technology, social media, grass-roots communication, social and cultural aspects of digital technologies, mobile fashion applications, and the dynamic fashion system in the virtual world. Visual identification symbols of fashion details, such as the Catalan hat or the Basque beret, the concept of “Made in Italy” and its success in the world, and new materials and technological innovations are also explored.