6 posts tagged “general crafts”

Stolen unrepentantly from other blogs:

Craftacular (via Not Martha) - Craft wiki. Pretty barren now. Eventually hopes to be a compendium of tutorials and patterns.

I guess one way of putting my "craft philosophy" into words is to say that I am I interested in "best practices" - there usually really ARE one or two "best" ways of doing a given thing, that will lead to the longest-lasting or most-professional-looking project (usually, but not always, mutually inclusive). Every time I post on Craftster, which hasn't been many, it's been to point out that if someone tweaks the way they're doing something, it'll last three times longer. This is usually stuff like using plastic-fusion spray paints to make over hard-side plastic luggage, instead of regular spray paint, or learning to wrap the base of wire loops when beading. For this reason, I think it'll be very interesting to see how Craftacular develops.

Thrift Store Scraps Into Lots of Hats (via CRAFTblog) - not all of these are made the way I would make them, to look the most "finished," but there are a lot of cute design ideas here. Check out the way the owl hat is made from the sleeve of a sweater or sweatshirt.

There's a special seasonal magazine available from Martha Stewart Living through the end of the month: Holiday Handmade Gifts!...

I have finally found some parrots to add to my "Craft Like A Pirate" post from a few weeks ago....

Why-hy-hy hey strangers!
Sorry for the silence around here... I was busy trying to do life stuff. It didn't go well, but we persevere.

Anyway, Lifehacker mentioned this new tool a few days ago: CraftMemo!

CraftMemo is a friendly little site to help you track and manage your craft supply inventory. Log in from anywhere to check just how many tubes of that one shade of blue delicas you might have, or how many balls of Cashmerino yarn in which colors.

I just spent over a month moping over wanting some decent liquid watercolors, currently being limited to a tiny, inexpensive travel set in cake form. I have a lot of art and craft supplies that haven't been used often since I moved a few years ago: all my belongings have been in too much disarray, but my supplies were mostly intact. The other night, it struck me that I had used some liquid watercolors back in - oh - 2000 or so. I went down to my supply area, and hey presto! Liquid watercolors in abundance, along with acrylic soft gel medium, a splendid collage glue.

My month of moping over my limited options wouldn't have happened if I'd had a tool like CraftMemo, because it would have been much easier to go shopping in my own collection. I forgot that I owned the liquid watercolor set primarily because it was deep in a drawer in a dark corner of my basement office.

And the other day, I was at the craft store looking for yarn to make a small crocheted doll for someone's birthday. As I prowled the racks, I realized that I had all the yarn I needed at home - and that my trip was totally unnecessary. CraftMemo might have saved me some gas.

You may not need something like this if you have a small collection of supplies that you tend to buy on a project-by-project basis. But if you work on stuff regularly and have a good stock of supplies, this could be the organizational/inventory solution for you!

As you may have noticed, I'm short on time lately. I don't have the time to write a full...

 

 

Big Girl Knits - yes! Helpful, interesting, and beautifully produced. On the other hand, some of the patterns have to be taken on a case-by-case basis, and I occasionally do not agree with the editors' estimation of them. A bigger review at another time. Though I'm on the small side of this book's audience, I definitely consider it a must-own. (Rowan's description of a 40" chest as "XL" really aggravates the heck out of me, but if you read this blog, you have probably already learned that. I am not a particularly large person, but I have a 44" chest. I'm one of those in-between people who are too small for plus sizes and slightly too large for most regular sizes.)

 

Wendy Knits - What happened? This book is text-heavy and may be worth reading, especially if you like Wendy's blog, but the production is terrible. I've only had a few minutes to look at it. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single color photo. Many of the patterns have either appeared on her blog before and/or are not that exciting (there seem to be a lot of tees and tanks with simple lace borders on them, and some of these garments don't fit their models particularly well). There are a few shawls and sweaters that look more interesting, mostly towards the back of the book. Bad Penguin! Bad! There are other books selling at the same price point that DO have color photos in them. I saw a proof of Edith Eig's book last summer that looked like this, but it was only a proof. So, I don't know... it seems unforgivable to not show us a colorwork sweater in, you know, color.

 

Inspired Cable Knits by Fiona Ellis is just lovely, though: beautiful, well-photographed designs.

 

Also - what's with all the t-shirt customization books? A spate of them has come out lately. I have Generation T to review, I just saw Tease at the bookstore last night, and there is a third, smaller book called something like 99 Ways To Customize a T-shirt.

 

 

Generation T is more about cutting and tying and repiecing tees, where Tease seems to be more about embellishment, though each dips a toe in the others' pond. Tease has a weird "craft celebrity" angle (look, I don't care if someone has a column in Paper or a show on the DIY Network, I care if their project is worth the time and materials it takes to make it), but in this case the projects seem generally worthwhile. The third book I mentioned is all line drawings with brief instructions, while the first two have full-color photos and detailed instructions.

 

There's also a spate of general "alternative crafts" books. Bazaar Bizarre looked pretty bad to me - for one thing, not a single item in it was something you couldn't figure out how to do online, and some of the crafts were fairly poor examples of their genre (the hairpieces! I've made those, and the ones in the book are bad), and IIRC some of the instructions were just incorrect. Way to cash in! It's been a while since I looked at it, though, so take the above with a grain of salt, except that my impression was negative.

 

 

I thought AlternaCrafts was better, better design, better projects, but still a book full of things that mostly have perfectly respectable free tutorials available online. The only thing I haven't seen before, at least not in this craft renaissance, was the cutting board customized with a wood-burner-inscribed design. The book seems to present a wide range of projects.

All might be fun for beginning crafters, but if you are reading this blog, the two books are probably not for you. Good for 14-year-old siblings and children of siblings. Good if you work with teens. Etc. You can still get the information online for free.

 

 

Higher on the scale is Super Crafty, which has finally arrived in my area... that one, I can recommend. Good instructions, good photos, good ideas, though some aren't as special as others.

 

I know I'll take a closer look at some of these in the near future. Right now another book I'm looking at, and plan to review soonish (after the, like, 20 other books I've been considering) is Art de la Soul by Kathy Cano-Murillo, aka Crafty Chica. It's pretty good.

On the other hand, you know better (or should know better) than to think that I'd go anywhere near Elissa Meyrich's Rip It!. Not recommended, on principle.

(All these links! Pardon me if one or another doesn't go where it's supposed to. I'm late for a party. A friend is moving to the West Coast. I made a bracelet for her last night, the first I've made in a long time, as I have not had any workspace for beading since moving to Ohio in late 2003. It came out pretty well, though it was not until after the knots were tied and the glue all dry that I noticed that it's asymmetrical in the length of each side and the number of beads on it... however, if I had added another bead, it would have been too long anyway. Just trying to get back in the swing of things. For my wedding this fall, I will either be dyeing silk shawls or making sets of fire-polished Czech glass bead jewelry. I'll post pictures of the bracelet I made last night, if they came out.)

Edited to add (5/2007): This is a post transferred over from the ashes of my old blog. Oh, I totally didn't get married last year; my fiance had to spend the entire wedding fund on emergency dental surgery & we're still working on saving up more money again....