Sewing Your Perfect Capsule Wardrobe: 5 Key Pieces To Tailor To Your Style by Arianna Cadwallader and Cathy McKinnon (Kyle, £19.99)
This useful and inspiring guide to making clothes embraces timeless classics. With detailed instructions for fit and finish, it shows five basic garments and explains how to adapt the patterns to your taste, so your skirt can be fitted or flared and your trousers straight or wide legged. It is published on October 5.
Modern Lettering: A Guide To Modern Calligraphy And Hand Lettering by Rebecca Cahill Roots (Batsford, £12.99)
There is something undeniably elegant about the hand-lettered gift tags, place cards, envelopes and invitations that stationery designer Rebecca Cahill Roots showcases in Modern Lettering.
Hoping to inspire “an inkling of the kind of magic that can be made by putting pen to paper”, she shares the basic skills needed to get started on your calligraphy adventure, offers tips about materials and provides practice-makes-perfect lessons to make your projects glow with individuality.
Papercut This Book by Boo Paterson (Batsford, £16.99)
Artist and illustrator Boo Paterson gets you scalpel ready for the “slow art” of paper cutting. It requires a lot of concentration and a steady hand but the results are intricate and beautiful.
The book comes with templates arranged in order of difficulty from the easy (a hovering hummingbird) to the tricky (an underwater scene).
She also includes colourful paper for creating your designs, suggestions for displaying your artwork and hints on how to repair mistakes and keep cutting lines clean.
50 Things To Do With A Penknife by Matt Collins (Pavilion, £9.99)
Matt Collins celebrates the wonders of whittling in this neat little book.
There are tips on maintaining and sharpening your blade, easy-to-make projects (and more complicated ones for the committed carver) and lovely line drawings by Maria Nilsson to illustrate step-by-step instructions for making a handy door wedge, turning a cork into earphone spools and, if you felt so inclined, you could even transform a carrot into a flute.
Assembled: Transform Everyday Objects Into Robots! edited by Eszter Karpati (Jacqui Small, £20)
“Old spatulas, rusty forks and spoons – really anything could be a potential robot ingredient,” says the editor of this cool, quirky guide to making metal figures from old junk and interesting cans.
Its instructions laid out like recipes with assembled lists of items you’ll need to transform utensils into robots, it shows the nuts and bolts of putting them together and explains how to “bend the tines of a fork individually to allow your robot to gesticulate”.