The humble pom pom is an unappreciated beast seen only on the top of woolly hats or on the buttons of sinister circus clowns. Shouldn't a fibre-based beast be given a little more love? The Resurrection Fern, craft website of the stunning photography and endless imagination, thinks so.
With a simple photo how to on pom pom making and the usual loveliness of craft through a lens, Margaret Oomen helps paint pom poms in a whole different light. Placing a few piles of pom poms around the home with an eye for classy decor they look more arty than bound for bobble hats.
She also puts one on a bandana-wearing cat for those of you who can't resist felines and fibre.
She also has an Etsy shop featuring some of her achingly lovely creations for sale. *sighs*
Yarnstorming, the less-violent and more eco-friendly name for knitting graffiti, sees the bar raised again as hooking hero Howie Woo storms Vancouver and cheers up some rather damp Vancouverites with his Stringing in the rain yarnstorm.
Howie, whose Woo Work website is a treasure trove of crochet gold, chose to yarnstorm the Davie Village Community Garden. The site was yarnstormed last summer by Jessica Glesby, and his theme was his pride in the Vancouver rain and his fine city.
You can see more photos and a video of the yarnstorm on Howie's blog.
Howie also gives a nod to rainy day stitchers and UK yarnstorming pioneers Knit the City in his comments too. All yarnstorming being one under the cloudy sky. It's no longer about wrapping bits of the city in yarn. Stories and statements in stitching are taking things to a new level.
Fourteen fabulous raindrop cats and dogs, which each took about four hours to make, now dangle from above as rainswept pedestrains sweep by. Leaving them with a smile and Howie with the honour of bringing woolly sunshine to the city.
New Year, new crafty goals? Most of us start the year with grand ideas of world domination within the next 12 months but tend to lose sight of our goals at some point as real life gets in the way. The solution to losing sight of the goalposts is to make yourself a personal manifesto with a little help from Gwen Bell.
Gwen suggests a few ways to create your manifesto and I've picked out a couple of the craftier ones:
A Vision Map - a flurry of magazines, scissors, glue and marker pens which creates a laminated map of things you want to get done. Stick it up on a wall or somewhere you can see it daily to give you an extra shove.
A Life List (pictured above) - Just what it says on the tin, the Life List, is a huge list of 100 goals/dreams/projects that you want to do before you kick the bucket. Gwen's whiteboard method makes the list very hard to ignore.
In both cases creating your list in a way that means you can cross off those you achieve gives you a sense of accomplishment for every one too.
It's all very well bursting with crafty ideas and ambitions but it definitely helps to plonk them all where you can see them. You can see Gwen's other suggestions here.
Crafting your manifesto also ends up being a project in itself, so you can cross that one off when you're done and you've made a start already.
Outside of the the making-stuff universe that is Crafty Crafty I get myself into much knitting madness Stitch and Bitch London style.
We recently exchanged some sparkling bits of Secret Santa stitching which I thought I would share with you Crafty Crafty watchers as a bit of inspiration for Christmas knitting and a grand idea for your own group.
There were 33 knitted gifts exchanged in our first Secret Santa and, hungry for more, we did it all again a week later for those who missed out in Secret Santa the Second with 11 crafty creations.
The format is simple: you put a handmade gift worth about £5 in, you take a gift out. Everyone wins something woolly.
Amongst the gifts that were unwrapped were snuggly snoods, adorable dippy dinopurses, soft scarves, cheerful Christmas tree cherubs, charming handmade charms, lovely leather wallets, headhugging hats, fine fingerless gloves, cute crocheted penguins and handstitched handbags to name a few. A seemingly endless stream of handmade creativity from a giggling group of London lovelies.
Continue reading >>
Lisa Lichtenfels's is a fabric artist with a bit of a difference. Rather than draping models in her fabrics creations she makes her models from fabric and the effect is eerily lifelike.
Starting her career studying Illustration and Film, Lisa worked at Disney Studios as an apprentice animator. She developed three-dimensional figurines with posable skeletons for stop-motion animation. Twenty-five years after leaving her work in film Lisa is still working with the nylon fabric and says she feels she "has only barely begun to realize what is possible in the medium".
Stretching moldable nylon over her skeletons she creates fabric art that has the illusion of living flesh. Her lifelike characters have real personality and colour. A look through the gallery on her website is an adventure in the possibilities of fabric art from her fin-footed wistful mermaid to her to more controversial pieces such as her Nursing Madonna.
With that much inspiration in fabric you may never throw out a pair of laddered tights again.
Fabulous things come stomping out of the mysterious lands of Japan. From giant Godzilla to the pointy-eared magic of Totoro it is a crafter's inspiration heaven. So although I can't read a word of Japanese I am always on the look out for crafty Japanese wonders and this crocheted woodland cuckoo clock will show you why.
The cuckoo clock is part of a collaboration of 50 artists and designers. Each clock is built around the same plain design by artist Naoto Fukasawa.
This particular offering is breathtakingly intricate with its fungus, flowers, moss and its own little punk caterpillar to finish off the whole thing. You can more pictures of the cuckoo clock here for a closer look.
From plain cuckoo clock to a forest home for a tiny bird with a bit of clever crochet. According to the site the clock was purchased by lottery winners the very day it went on show. A worthy piece of arty craft to spend your winnings on in my opinion.
Craft and fashion often combine with some interesting results. It can go horribly wrong and it can go wonderfully weird. Hitting for the wonderfully weird but utterly amazing team, are Romance was Born.
Australian designers, Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales combine a love of kitsch Australiana, crafty construction and fine tailoring to "turn the dreaded cultural cringe on its head" and the results are crafty, kooky and downright inspiring. Take a wander through the collections on their website to see hot pink trousers with dinosaur spikes, a crocheted green beard, dresses covered in eyeballs, and squid hats complete with tentacles.
You won't find any outfits you might want to wear out dancing of a weekend but you'll certainly have fun imagining yourself doing so in one of their creations. Underneath their crazed crafty costumes there are also hints at versions you might make yourself with the kook-factor turned down a tad.
Whichever way you look at it there's inspiration all over Romance was Born. Well worth checking out.
digg this |
del.icio.us this
| 
Stumble It!
