The Craft Book Challenge

I have a confession to make: I own a lot of craft books. One of my favorite parts of Half Price Book trips with Charlie is checking out the knitting, crochet, and cross stitch books. I never really quantified how many I actually owned until now… I've hit the point where I've accidentally bought books I already own because I have that many now. Oops.

So I went on a personal journey to find an app to catalogue my books and stop the insanity. I tried out a few and ended up going with Libib. It's basically a library management system, and I went with it for a few reasons:
- iOS app for access on the go
- Search function on the app for ease of finding books by title or author
- Online access via browser
- Sharing via social media
- Built-in barcode scanner on the iOS app for easy adding of books
- Stats (!!!)
- Beautiful UI
- Can also catalog movies, video games, and music

I very excitedly went through my home library and added all of my books, creating separate library lists in the app for everything from my vegan cookbooks, to crochet, knitting, cross stitch, general crafts (like origami!), language & grammar, media studies, music studies, scores… I even put in my Doctor Who DVD collection. And holy cow, I have a lot of craft books!

As of this post, I have 36 crochet books and 59 knitting books. What?! I guess when they're under $10 at HPB it's hard to pass them up. (Full disclosure: this count doesn't include pamphlets like the Berroco ones, or books from yarn companies without UPCs…it should, though, maybe I'll do that sometime soon…)

My gut reaction was to cull the library; why do I need so many? And then I thought of something better; why not challenge myself to make at least one item out of every book I own? So that's what I'm going to do. I'm calling it the Craft Book Challenge. I bet this will take me years, but if I really can't find something to make out of a book then it probably isn't worth having anymore! If there's a book that I've already made a handful of items from, I'll use past projects. But if I either have a UFO or haven't made something at all, I'm going to pick a new project from the book and make it.

Some projects go by faster than others, so depending on the book it may take a long time to make something (like the Great American Afghan pamphlet I have).

Thanks to the cool metrics on Libib I should be able to track it pretty well. And as I add new books, my Craft Book Challenge will grow. Hm, maybe that will discourage me from buying more (doubt it).

If you want to join in and do your own Craft Book Challenge just tag it #modtitancbc on Twitter or Instagram or wherever else so we can all celebrate the craft books we own and the crafts we make! I'll only post FOs here but I should hopefully have one to post in the next week or two!