With over 300 unique bead crochet patterns, The Encyclopedia of Tubular Bead Crochet is undoubtedly the most thorough guide to this beautiful craft. Ann Benson brings more than fifty years of crafting experience to this comprehensive book, featuring these topics:

Basic stitching techniques

Materials including beads and threads

Tools and equipment

Over 300 patterns from five-around to ten-around, as well as flat patterns

Multiple finishing techniques including the invisible join

Troubleshooting guide

Design your own blanks

Resources for enhancing your bead crochet experience

Whether you're just beginning or you're an accomplished bead crocheter, there's something for you in this detailed, richly illustrated guide to your bead crochet journey.

Ann Benson brings her unmatched ability to simplify how-it's-done to the elegant art of Euro tubular bead crochet, also sometimes called double bead crochet. This gorgeous technique yields smooth, perfect crocheted tubes with intricate pattern detail and highly adjustable size. It's easy to master, following Ann's exceptionally clear and detailed tutorials for basic techniques, materials, design-your-own, and finishing. Ms. Benson's renowned artistic perspective on color and pattern are reflected in almost five hundred unique designs; this work of art will bring you many hours of joyful crafting.

Ann Benson brings her time-tested perspective and decades of craft experience to the beautiful art of loom beading in a comprehensive book that features:

Fifty unique designs in various widths and lengths

Detailed materials lists including bead color numbers and quantities

Finishing methods galore: clasps, buttonholes, magnetics and more

Sizing your project for the perfect fit

Tools and equipment that won't break the bank

Resource information for beads and fibers

And so much more!

Whether you're a novice or an accomplished maker, this book will bring something special to your crafting and give you hours of beading pleasure.

Designs, patterns and techniques for combining beads and fibers on almost any kind of loom. Ann Benson brings her unmatched ability to simplify how-it's-done to the blending of these two complementary and compatible skills. Using widely available materials, you can create fresh and amazing results following step-by-step directions and designer tips. Ann explains different types of small looms (even how to make your own loom!), the different fibers and threads, sizing and shapes of beads, tools and equipment. There are simple and clear guidelines for how to design your own pieces along with professional tips for finishing and materials sourcing. This follow-up book to her #1 best-seller LOOM BEADING will take you to the next level with clear instructions, precise graphics, colorful photography and more. A great addition to your own DIY library and a wonderful gift for anyone who loves fibers and/or beads.

Ann Benson shares the professional methods and practices that will bring your bead embroidery to a whole new level. Using her unique design and technological skills, Ann brings you over one hundred designs, motifs, and templates that you can develop according to your own color taste and end use. Combine, crop, repeat, recolor and resize, it's all up to you!

Explore the many materials and surfaces on which you can do bead embroidery. Learn how to apply your design onto your chosen surface using different techniques, from simple sketching to high-end technology. Professional finishing techniques and edgings will make your pieces shine. Discover ways to incorporate non-traditional materials into your designs, including fibers, paper craft elements and hidden treasures from your local hardware store. There's no limit to what you can use and no limit to what you can achieve. Ann will be your guide.

Dozens of iconic antique and traditional woven rug patterns and designs in beautifully detailed colored charts for needlepoint, loom beading, cross stitch, bead crochet, mosaics-any charted technique. Ann Benson brings her unique design and tech skills to a stunning collection of full-color stitching/weaving patterns. Each pattern includes a full overview with sectioned enlargements, color recommendations and materials amounts for wool, floss, seed and cylinder beads, and suggestions for use. These easy-to-read charted patterns are great for needlepoint, beaded needlepoint, looming, counted cross stitch, bead crochet, mosaics, and more.

Part historical novel, part futuristic adventure . . . chock full of curious lore and considerable suspense.--Entertainment Weekly

It is history's most feared disease. It turned neighbor against neighbor, the civilized into the savage, and the living into the dead. Now, in a spellbinding novel of adventure and science, romance and terror, two eras are joined by a single trace of microscopic bacterium--the invisible seeds of a new bubonic plague.

In the year 1348, a disgraced Spanish physician crosses a landscape of horrors to Avignon, France. There, he will be sent on an impossible mission to England, to save the royal family from the Black Death. . . .

Nearly seven hundred years later, a woman scientist digs up a clod of earth in London. In a world where medicine is tightly controlled, she will unearth a terror lying dormant for centuries.

From the primitive cures of the Middle Ages to the biological police state of our near future, The Plague Tales is a thrilling race against time and mass destruction. For in 2005, humankind's last hope for survival can come only from one place: out of a dark and tortured past.

Praise for The Plague Tales

Benson reveals a formidable talent as she blends historical fiction with a near-future bio-thriller.--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Harrowing . . . Will give readers both nightmares and thrills . . . A carefully woven page-turner from which . . . Robin Cook and Michael Crichton could learn.--Library Journal

A hard-to-put-down thriller steeped in historical fiction and bio-tech sci-fi.--Middlesex News (Mass.)

With her acclaimed novels The Plague Tales and The Burning Road, Ann Benson has carved out a unique place on the literary landscape with her fascinating alchemy of mystery, history, and psychological terror. Now this gifted storyteller returns with an astounding tale of two crime waves separated by nearly 600 years. In each, the victims are children. In each, the perpetrator is a man of power and renown. And in each, the pursuit of justice is spearheaded by a woman who has seen the face of evil up close--and whose own life is entwined with a madman's.

In the city of Nantes, in the year 1440, a woman hurries through the cobblestoned streets. Her world of faith, loyalty, and family is buckling under the weight of her suspicions about a dead child...and others who may have met the same fate--all at the hands of the same killer--the infamous Gilles de Rais. Soon Guillemette le Drappi re, companion to the Bishop of Nantes, is investigating the young nobleman she helped raise from infancy. To unravel the truth, Guillemette must enter a dark realm of power, perversion, bloodlust--and bring to it the unforgiving light of the church she serves.

In the city of Los Angeles, in the year 2002, a detective gets the kind of call she dreads most: My child is gone. Lany Dunbar, a mother, a cop, and a veteran of human horrors, cannot be prepared for where this search will lead her. For within days, Lany is certain that this missing-child case has exposed the work of a serial killer. At odds with her own department, sure that her killer is becoming more emboldened, Lany zeroes in on a suspect--while a suspect zeroes in on her....

Two horrific crime sprees. Two extraordinary eras. The connections between them are at once eerie, compelling, and surprising. Only Ann Benson can weave together the strands of history and suspense with such mastery. Skillfully blending past and present, myth and reality, Benson catapults us from an age when wolves ran wild through the streets of Paris to an age of high-tech criminal profiling. A riveting, rousing adventure through time, history, and forensic science, Thief of Souls introduces two unforgettable characters, separated by centuries, linked by a passionate quest for justice. For in a race to stop monsters from more monstrous crimes, both women will discover a frightening truth: that within a killer is a child, and within a child are seeds of both innocence and evil.

By night Regina Bugbee runs an outreach center near Bellevue Hospital for lost and vulnerable men who fear the larger shelters. By day she cares for the impaired man who would have been her husband, had he not been tragically hurt running toward--not away--from the collapsing Twin Towers. She struggles through this tangled life, aching to reclaim the impossibly blue sky of that cruel and jarring day, five years before, when the future arrived.
Then one winter night, the future arrives again. This time it's in the form of a baffling, unconventional and possibly insane stranger who claims to be, of all things, a Greek god. He's brought to her center by cops after a skirmish with one of her regulars. She thought she'd seen it all, but he's too clean, too sober, and too articulate to fit the usual mold; he's odd and quirky and--above all, fascinating. Despite the skepticism of her coworkers, friends and therapist, Gina digs into his incomprehensible past in an attempt to decipher his mystery.
She enlists the aid of another client, who overcomes his initial dislike and befriends the stranger. Together this mismatched pair embark on a bizarre and convoluted trek through the glories and agonies of lower Manhattan. And even though she cannot seem to pin him down, Gina continues to hover over this enigmatic stranger with as much diligence as all her clients, all the while sloshing forward in her quest to find contentment in her own life. A treasured and admired coworker wants to help her fill that void, but Gina cannot bring herself to abandon the hero she once loved.
The stranger has a thing or two to say about that. And he needs something from her, just one small thing, to find his own clarity: he needs her to believe that he is indeed who he says he is.
Easier said than done.

Ann Benson brings her unique design perspective and unmatched ability to simplify how-it's-done to the marriage of two looming techniques. If you love weaving with beads or creating small woven tapestries, you'll understand how these two complementary and compatible skills can be combined with fresh and amazing results. Ann explains the different fibers and threads, sizing and shapes of beads, different types of small looms (even how to make your own loom!). Professional tips for finishing and sourcing are included. This follow-up to her LOOM BEADING book will take you to the next level with clear instructions, precise graphics, colorful photography and more. A great addition to your own DIY library and a wonderful gift for anyone who loves fibers and/or beads.