Friday, April 11, 2008

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.

Know more? Share!

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!

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