Customize blank T-shirts or any other piece of fabric into wearable art with popular artist Mike Perry's cool hand-drawn illustrations and alphabets. Easy instructions plus more than 50 vividly colorful, ready-to-transfer iron-ons make for instantly gratifying clothing design....

Pattern can be derived from many sources if we remember to look closely. While patterns have been around forever there's a recent movement a tendency among designers to allow patterns to animate their work with colorful and exuberant complexity. Over and Over: A Catalog of Hand-Drawn Patterns collects groundbreaking work from fifty of today's most talented designers who create patterns by hand and use them in their work in inventive and innovative ways. From Deanne Cheuk's patterns that adorn current fashion to those of Robin Cameron that explore her interest in art to Garrett Morin's patterns that arose from an exercise for a character called Eloie the examples in this book push the boundaries of the traditional concept of what a pattern is. The selected works are often not an end result but the beginning of something else of something bigger and broader. While the computer is sometimes involved in the production of patterns the hand-drawn element is always evident in the uniqueness of these works. Featuring more than 250 vibrant and exciting patterns Over and Over explores this magic on every single page and will inspire designers everywhere....

The author of Population: 485 returns, delivering a truckload of humor, heart, and . . . gardening tips? Think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, complete with stock cars, sexy vegetables, and a laugh track.

"All I wanted to do was fix my old pickup truck," says Michael Perry. "That, and plant my garden. Then I met this woman. . . ." Truck: A Love Story recounts a year in which Perry struggles to grow his own food ("Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Penthouse combined"), live peaceably with his neighbors (one test-fires his black powder rifle in the alley; another's best Sunday shirt reads 100 PERCENT WHUP-ASS), and sort out his love life. But along the way, he sets his hair on fire, is attacked by wild turkeys, takes a date to the fire department chicken dinner, and proposes marriage to a woman in New Orleans. As with Population: 485, much of the spirit of Truck: A Love Story may be found in the characters Perry meets: a one-eyed land surveyor, a paraplegic biker who rigs a sidecar so that his quadriplegic pal can ride along, a bartender who refuses to sell light beer, an enchanting woman who never existed, and half the staff of National Public Radio.

By turns hilarious and heartfelt, a tale that begins on a pile of sheep manure, detours to the Whitney Museum of American Art, and returns to the deer-hunting swamps of northern Wisconsin, Truck: A Love Story becomes a testament to the surprising and unintended consequences of love. 1006

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Welcome to New Auburn, Wisconsin, where the local vigilante is a farmer's wife armed with a pistol and a Bible, the most senior member of the volunteer fire department is a cross-eyed butcher with one kidney and two ex-wives (both of whom work at the only gas station in town), and the back roads are haunted by the ghosts of children and farmers. Against a backdrop of fires and tangled wrecks, bar fights and smelt feeds, Population: 485 is a comic and sometimes heartbreaking true tale leavened with quieter meditations on an overlooked America.

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