Accessories are everything when you're a crafty creature. Once the craft bug bites you need places to store things, bags to tote things, markers to make things and purses to shove all your bits and bobs in. A solution is needed and flapping to the rescue are the good folks at The Bothered Owl.
Alex and Sarah, the handmade heroes who make up The Bothered Owl, are two Aussie ex-pats crafting their creations over here in London. They check two of the coolest boxes in craft in that their makings heavily involve the wonder that is Lego and they manage to rustle up some of the finest fabrics I've ever seen.
Their Etsy and Folksy shops wave their cute and quirky Lego stitchmarkers and jewellery in your face, wink cheekily at you with brooches and purses adorned with dancing skeletons and wise owls, and tempt you in with more needle rolls, totes and project bags than you can stuff your stuff into.
All sewn items feature fabrics you'd walk over the sharpest bits of Lego barefoot just to get your hands on.
What also sets them apart from the handmaking hoardes is their willingness to listen to your ideas on what you might be missing for your crafty collection. Read their blog, comment on their stuff, tweet them on Twitter.
Definitely crafters to keep your owl eyes on.
Apparently fur is back in fashion. In my mind it's never been ok to swan into a fancy party decked in the embalmed remains of one of the forest's furry friends and thankfully most agree. That doesn't stop those of us who admire the animal kingdom longing for a creature companion at such events, which is where Knitty's Vegan Fox comes in.
With a little bit of novelty yarn (how most of us run for the hills at the mere thought of knitting with it) and your basic inc and K2tog you could soon wow the party people with a knitted fibre-based fox draped across your shoulders.
The free pattern comes from Knitty.com which, if you knit but have been living in yarn-stuffed cave for the past few years, is possibly the most fabulous free pattern site out there next to Ravelry.
Get your fur-wearing funk on without death to small creatures. Go on.
Buttons are all kinds of fabulous. There really isn't any piece of clothing that can't be improved without buttons. Or a person for that matter. Even the button-eyed 'Other Mother' from Neil Gaiman's spooky Coraline had a bit of stylishness about her.
But you can't always get your crafty mitts on the perfect button for your project sadly. But you're a crafty lot, obviously, so why not make your own?
Craftystylish's Linda Permann offers a very simple step-by-step tutorial on how to make polymer clay buttons of your very own. In a flurry of cotton reels, rolling pins and toothpicks you can go from the buttonless to being a virtual pearly queen of your own making.
See the full how to here and start fabricating your own fastenings.
Ella Johnston is a London artist turning her interest in natural found objects and beauty discovered in everyday environments into art. I'm a little bit in love with the results; captivating prints and drawings of flowers to cheeky many-coloured British birds.
Ella has exhibited as part of the London Design Festival and at galleries across the UK. Her prints and drawings also grace the covers of music by small independent record label Hard-Graft and for influential London folk club night All Aboard the Mudlark.
Recently Ella joined the crafty crowd with her art. She recently opened her Akaya shop on Folksy offering badges and cards with her original designs on them.
An affordable and crafty way to accessorize and stand out by wearing elegant original art on your sleeve.
Some of us are far too busy for bandying about town searching for something shiny to say I love you. There's crafting to be done and no time to do it in. Which is why this super-quick how to for a felted heart necklace is perfect for a quick but cute valentine's crafting.
The free Heart-Felt Necklace pattern is simple: a quickly knit square of pure wool which is felted, cut and strung on a necklace with a heart-shaped charm. There's a free PDF with a heart-shaped template for your cut out and a handy link to some rather lovely MODA DEA "Bamboo Wool" in a kicky chilli pepper red to make things even easier.
A cute little pendant in less time than it takes you to fight the crowds in the bustling shops to buy something half as nice.
The armadillo. Weird, wonderful and the perfect accessory for night out. I stumbled across a pattern for an armadillo bracelet on my crafty wanderings and had to share. It's quirky, its made from stuff you've probably got lying around and it's oddly cute.
The bracelet is fashioned from little more than a cardboard tube, a handful of pebbles and lots of lovely glue and the how to for it couldn't be easier. It's just the sort of slightly unsettling thing that might suddenly pop up on the catwalk. Images of sozzled celebs lurching out of limos with pebble-made mammals strapped to their wrists doesn't seem all that unlikely to me.
Odd as the bracelet might be to some I do like the idea of using pebbles in a crafty manner. Credit crunch eat your heart out.
See the full tutorial here.
If you feel like a project this weekend, a tote bag is probably the easiest handbag style to DIY, and this one I spotted over on Lia's Space is extremely cute. It is, in fact, not one bag but many, all hidden away for extreme practicality.
The 'moving bag' is so-called because it contains a number of Russian doll-like smaller bags, so the owner can choose which items to take with them and which to leave behind. Lia's used a variety of coloured PVC fabrics to create the durable and versatile totes.
If you'd like to download a tutorial and try making your own, you can do so here.
digg this |
del.icio.us this
| 
Stumble It!
