New Friday Findings

Lots of found stuff this week, a snapshot of what I've been up to: skill-building, kid-swapping, felt foods, craft fair applications, etc.

Brainstorming ideas for my Craft for My Kids swap, I came across this pattern for cloth baby shoes. I was always a weird parent, in that I never really got into baby shoes (or bibs, to many extended relatives' frustration--on a visit, a relative once tied a cloth napkin around my baby's neck when I wasn't looking), but I was actually thinking it might be really awesome to expand this pattern and try it out for adult slippers.

And here's a pattern for a little fabric house. Next rainy day, I can imagine making about a thousand of these with the kids, an entire city of little fabric houses to step over or, Godzilla-like, ON.

I found this blog during a Google Image search for felt food ideas--I love the fact that this author makes stuff for the kids, shops in thrift stores, and, ooh, scroll down until you see the Super Mario Bros. quilt--awesome!

In my search for indie craft fairs to apply for (or shop at!), I decided just to make a collection of all the ones I find, since they're still more rare than not. Stitch Rock, unfortunately, takes place in Florida, but I love its tag line: "bringing back old school crafting technique with new school flare." Black Sheep, also in Florida, also has a good one: "Be there or knit a granny square."

I could possibly attend something like the Detroit Urban Craft Fair--I'm thinking about driving-distance destinations with either relatives to visit or cool kid-friendly tourist stuff to do. That's how the St. Louis Rock-n-Roll Craft Show fits in, too, since they have a zoo and their hands-on science museum has animatronic dinosaurs.

And so you don't think that I haven't been reading real, live books this week, here are two I've been working my way through while drinking coffee or nursing: Bend-the-Rules Sewing: The Essential Guide to a Whole New Way to Sew, by Amy Karol, is such a useful resource for a self-taught sewist because it offers some pretty intricate projects that I can totally get into, but without using the technical language I never learned. I just realized, while flipping through it for an example, that there is something in here I am absolutely going to modify for my swap!--lips are zipped.

I'm still more of a peruser of knitting books than an actual knitter, but Twinkle's Big City Knits: 31 Chunky-Chic Designs, by Wenlan Chia, makes good perusing. Also peruse the list of errata, though, and no foul there, because manuals are hard to do. My editor, back when I wrote for The TCU Magazine, once told a story of being a proofreader among a team of proofreaders and being called to the carpet because 10,000 copies or something of some math book, like Advanced Geometry or something, had been shipped out and it took a high school kid, instead of an entire chain of command of publishers' employees, to notice that on the front cover, Geometry was misspelled. Anyway, I don't dress in girl clothes, and you know I don't really knit (yet), but for some reason I really love the downtown groovy sweater dress on page 16.

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P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!