Reviewed by annieb123 on
Dude Crafts is an illustrated tutorial how-to guide with tongue firmly in cheek. The projects are way out there and silly and/or campy. They range from bizarre: a flask hidden inside a realistic baby doll (complete with baby-pack carrier) to the odd: a DIY paracord bullwhip, to the MacGuyverish: PVC freezing tubes for your favorite beverage coolers.
Released 2nd Oct 2018 by Quarto on their Voyageur imprint, it's 192 pages and available in hardcover format.
While this book has a very humorous feel, there are a number of useful items which can be made with the tutorials provided. Keys can be kept together in a swiss-army-knife type contraption, your bottle opener will never go missing again, thanks to neodymium magnets and a disembowled doll/action figure, and several other notable more-or-less utilitarian pieces. There are of course some purely humorous projects: a keen amateur can make a hysterically realistic head-in-a-jar which looks like a friend or coworker, the aforementioned flask in a realistic babydoll in a carrier, and a dinosaur pencil sharpener.
While admittedly there weren't any of the 50 projects which called out to me to be made right away, there certainly were enough nuggets of advice and jumping off points that I'm sure I'll be using some of the ideas in one form or another in the future.
Four stars for the humor and wacky ideas.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes
Reading updates
- Started reading
- Finished reading
- 18 February, 2019: Reviewed