Spiritual Crafting books by Kimberly Winston

First, my apologies – I’m a bad blogger at the moment. I’m working really hard on a number of things that are either non-crafty, or are very crafty, but that I can’t show you. I hope to return to regular crafty programming very soon.

I wanted to share these books with you, as a further discussion of the whole crafting as spirituality subject. The author, Kimberly Winston, was nice enough to contact me about these books while I was working on the recent podcast.

If you’re taken aback by words like “prayer” and “ministry” on these covers, let me assure you – these are not books that profess any specific spiritual tradition. In fact, I was delighted to see everyone from Pope John Paul II to Walt Whitman to Wiccan author Scott Cunningham quoted here.

These are books about how crafting fits into spiritual practice, and they are very worthwhile reads.

Bead One, Pray Too looks at prayer beads – how to make them, how several different spiritual traditions use them, and ways you might use them to enhance your own meditative/contemplative efforts. If you listened to the podcast, you may recall the great things Amy had to say about how she uses prayer beads to help keep her centered during the ups and downs of daily living. The book has great instructions for building a string of prayer beads, either by following a specific religion’s design, or creating something more personal to you.

Fabric of Faith is about prayer quilts, which are quilts that are constructed as carriers for prayers – or positive energies or well-wishes or however you’d like to define that. These are tie-quilted quilts, and it’s the ties themselves that symbolically and physically “bind” these energies into the quilts. The quilts are then given to people facing illness, loss, and tragedy as healing tools.

The stories in this book are absolutely beautiful. These quilts really do make a difference in the lives of the recipients, and the dedication of the groups around the world who make them is truly inspiring.

Whatever your spiritual beliefs and practices are, these books provide a very lucid look into a deeper dimension of crafting.