Bringing art into one's life brings a sense of joy and contemplation. Art can bring even more: it can bring a sense of tranquility, empowerment, and emotional release, and it help you orient yourself within the world around you. The CREATIVITY CONNECTIONS book is designed to help you connect through artistic expression in order to promote wellness by bringing more beauty, and more appreciation for beauty, into everyday living. The creativity connections method explains how, regardless of your perceived skill or prior work in art, you can tap into your own creativity, and how you can encourage others, to explore emotions and experience. Engaging in a creative enterprise allows us to connect with our thoughts and our feelings as we contemplate not just the pictures we produce, but also our inner selves. And it enables us to connect with others as we each work on a project in a group or as we collaborate with others on a collective work. Ultimately, there is value in both the process and the product. The creativity connections approach offers a series of ideas and themes to inspire creativity. Art making can be deliberative or subliminal, with industry or without effort, with concentration or without focus. You'll learn how to interpret the work that you create, without judgment or presumption. And throughout, you'll gain insight into how the process and the product afford opportunities for self-growth. Art nurtures and sustains. It provides inspiration and solace. And it is a catalyst for connection with oneself and with others.

People who are good at creating ideas are good at seeing connections. Could teaching people to see connections be a way to help them be more creative? Over the years, there's a need for a book on creativity that complements the teaching of the creative process and tools and gives you a practical approach to how to enhance your innate ability to think creatively. This book as an opportunity to dispel the myth that creative talent is something possessed by a gifted minority. This is the opportunity to pass on 'the secret' of highly creative people to a much wider audience. It's a chance to give others the knowledge, techniques, and training they need to enhance their own innate creativity and lead the way to fun, fulfillment, invention, innovation, and change. It's a unique book that combines a very hands on and practical approach with a solid scholarly foundation.

Garden fashions continually evolve but an understanding of fundamental principles underlies all thoughtful design. So all novice garden designers and landscape contractors must make themselves familiar with the elements that constitute garden space. This book is packed with line drawings, informal sketches and sections of actual garden plans that have evolved from the Authors' wide experience. Colour photographs - many of which are linked to plans within the text - all help to enhance the principles, problems and solutions that designers will have to face. With such information in front of them, student readers will be encouraged to look, think and analyse before taking up pencil, computer mouse or spade. Already on college reading lists, this book is a must for all beginners starting out on careers as garden designers and builders.

Here is an important look at creative ways to successfully blend theoretical knowledge with skillful intervention in social group work. Theory and Practice in Social Group Work represents leading works in conceptual development that creatively connect practice with theory and also reflect the current diversity of interventions in group work practice. The book calls for more carefully articulated connections between knowledge and action and maps a strategy for strengthening social work curriculum and expanding group work practice. Some of the areas discussed include group work in medical and health settings, group work with people undergoing life cycle transitions, and group work interventions with vulnerable populations. A wide range of possibilities for applying theories in group work situations are presented in this thought-provoking volume. Some specific examples discussed include group work interventions with persons affected by the AIDS crisis and persons at high risk of contracting HIV, a group model for the management of chronic pain, group intervention services for the homeless mentally ill delivered through a mobile outreach team, a bingo group in an SRO hotel, group work with adults molested as children, and a model of practice for work with minority populations and communities.

Catechists have a lot on their plates. Teaching about the Catholic faith is not simple or easyand who knows this better than they? The best catechists have learned that ultimately all of their teaching centers around Jesus: his teachings, the sacraments, the Eucharistic liturgy, and all of our Catholic customs and traditions. These include Catholic Social Teaching. Jesus is at the heart here too, for all social teaching focuses on loving and serving others as Jesus does. Here Sr. Janet Schaeffler offers catechists creative (and fun) ways to focus on Catholic Social Teachings with those they teach (and their parents). By doing so, they are living their baptism as disciples of Jesus. And, she describes all this from A to Z, quite literally.

Far from its original utilitarian use—to create armor—the chain-mail technique has been adapted over time to create beautiful, unique jewelry. In Chain and Bead Jewelry Creative Connections, chain-mail expert Scott David Plumlee shows jewelry makers, beaders, and crafters at all skill levels how to incorporate beads into a variety of chain-mail weaves to create showstopping pieces. First, Plumlee walks readers through basic skills and provides detailed information on traditional chain designs. He then presents more than 20 wire-wrapping and bead-setting techniques that incorporate beads seamlessly into a variety of designs, from the creative “Chaos” wire-wrapped bead to the sinuous Snake. With step-by-step instructions for assembling age-old chain patterns—from simple to complex—and gorgeous designs that can be executed using only simple hand tools, Chain and Bead Jewelry Creative Connections is sure to inspire jewelry artisans at all levels to expand the creative possibilities of their work.