Check out this fun tutorial to turn regular canned goods into cool looking photo frames.
Great example at kottke, where I first spotted this tutorial, and suggestions to empty out the cans before you begin and use the finished product as storage for pens and pencils.
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Amber writes this:
Hello lovely whip-up people!
I love your site so much – it is my favourite! As soon as I see a bold faced whip-up in my bloglines I click straight on it!
I am so excited that you have added a kiddie craft ideas author! Of course, kath red has been posting some awesome kid’s craft ideas for
ages but I think it definitely deserves a dedicated author. Yay!have a kids craft site called ‘kids craft weekly’. I post original ideas on different themes each week. … I’m a crafter from way back so I really enjoy coming up with ideas and making sure they’re super simple
but appealling. I started the site as an antidote to all the appalling kid craft sites on the internet that are full of crazy ads and terrible
ideas and dismal printable pages.
[thanks for the great letter Amber]
Mary writes in to tell us about a feature on architectural digest that readers might be interested in called ‘marys finds’.
Linda writes in tell us about a spinning tutorial she has written up on her blog.
hi, i check in to see your very nice site when i get a minute. I’ve recently put together a little thing that shows how i made a yarn from
start to finish. didn’t see anything like it, so maybe you’d want to let people know about it?
fred flare are having a poetry writing contest.
mimi wrote in with a link to the hypobolic crochet shapes that she spotted at design sponge – thanks mimi.
Pauline wrote in to tell us about a glamour knitting competition at knitchicks that she and her friends are putting together.
In celebration of our annual pilgrimage to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace (aka Ally Pally), London knitters (Kate Buchanan, Aneeta Patel and myself, Pauline Wall) have organised a glamour knitting comp.
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One of the oldest art forms found worldwide in every culture and society is mask making. I love making masks and really enjoy making them with children too. The above photo depicts some large scale masks I made with 30 children a couple of years ago. We formed them with paper mache on chickenwire and then set them to music with one friend creating a musical score and another friend creating the choreography. It was an amazing way to see the masks celebrated. They became a moving musical mask mobile!
There really are so many variations and ways and materials to make masks that you could make a mask every day for a year and not duplicate them. Just by going to your local library and exploring the books on a particular culture through their masks, will lend some ideas too! Here are some links to some masks and methods to make masks with your children and as always yourself!
Using the ever favorite paper mache you can create a pharoah mask,cultural masks,pumpkin masks,African masks,and for older children – the rigid plaster mask is quite exciting. Sometimes a prompt for a child can be as easy as asking them to show a feeling they have or want to pretend to express through their mask. Everyone can make a mask from a paperplate. Remember too, if you don’t have paint for the mask, using fabric, tissue paper, scraps of yarn, bottlecaps, cotton wool, and other found objects can be more interesting than paint or markers!
Here are a couple of links to two friends of mine who make and use masks as their artform – both visually and with the performing arts: Jeanne McCartin visual artist and Bonnie and Andrew Periale who are renound puppeteers using masks as part of their performances. This summer we travelled to Montreal, Quebec and saw the most incredible masks made by Canadian artist Brian Jungen. They were some of the most moving works in masks that I have ever seen. The list is endless. Masks are everywhere!
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Whiptips – a crafts advice column for readers to ask questions or offer advice by leaving comments. View the Whiptips archive here. You can submit questions, to whiptips@gmail.com. Please include photos with your questions!
Dixie writes in asking for instructions for hand hemming silk.
I have lost instructions I had years ago for hand hemming silk scarves. It used only hand stitching and involved taking a few small stitches in a certain way then pulling gently on the thread to turn the hem into a roll. Can you help!!! I am so in need of this.
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Before we had our own fabric line I used to flip casually through bolts of fabric at the quilt shop unaware of who designed it, how many inks were on the selvedge or how elegantly the repeat looked spread over a couple of yards. But yesterday when the sample cuts of our fifth line of fabrics arrived from FreeSpirit I realized that I look at fabric differently now, so I thought I’d share the perspective of the fabric designer.
The fabric company generally suggests how many colorways of how many patterns they are interested in having you design. Much like the way a singer approaches music, a designer chooses a strategy for a line of fabrics. There are singers who do covers of songs written by someone else just as there are fabric designers who have a particular interest in recoloring existing designs. These designers can’t use any designs under copyright but generally anything that is considered to be historic, vintage or looks like some wallpaper you’ve seen before either never had a copyright on it or the copyright has expired. In any case the design is now considered to be in the public domain and is up for grabs. In this case, neither the the original designer of the artwork nor his/her heirs receives any compensation. When designing a line of recolrings, the designer gives a swatch of the fabric to the mill and indicates which colors are to be changed. No original hand drawings or digital files are needed, just swatches of the colors to be swapped out. Because the fabric has already been printed, the repeats are already done and the production is more predictable.
The other species of designer is the singer-songwriter type of designer who designs everything from scratch. All of the artwork is original and the production process is far more time-consuming, unpredicatble and complicated from a technical perspective. Some of the designers who work in this manner start from line drawings, digital files, gouache paintings or hand-dyeing. Some give this art directly to the mill to convert to a repeat while others painstakingly create the repeat themselves using graphic design software. They generally deliver a digital file to the mill. Although most designers are paid royalties on the amount of yardage sold, not on the amount of time spent on the design process, some designers opt for controlling as much of the process as they can, even though it is not financially in their interests to do so. As we are this latter type of designer, we try not to think about just how much time we spend getting from scratch to the digital file with repeats.
Although the US grows a tremendous amount of cotton, quilting fabric companies report that the minimum yardage required to print something at a US fabric mill is not economically feasible for the “new is better, new gets them into the shop” mindset that pervades the quilting world. So US companies often have their fabrics printed in Korea, Japan or China. After the designs are sent to the mills, repeats are designed if this hasn’t been done by the designer, and engravings of the designs are done. Rough prints, called “strike-offs,” are done by hand with different screens for each ink used. Those are the little dots you see along the selvedge of the fabric. The mill that FreeSpirit uses can accomodate 18 different inks in a pattern and repeats of up to 30.” More sophisticated machinery is required for larger repeats and more inks. Amazingly, the room full of computers at the mill operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, churning out new engravings.
It is usually months before the designer sees the strike-offs and it is a nerve-wracking wait. Quilting fabrics are launched at either the annual International Quilt Market in Houston, Texas in October or at the Spring Market which changes locations annually in the US. Designers work with fabric companies to make corrections to the strike-offs, sometimes they turn out the way you envisioned and sometimes they don’t.
Sample quilts are made, sometimes by the designer, sometimes by a contract sewer and they are taken to Market. These “free” patterns are given away by the fabric companies to promote the line to shop owners and many find their way online into the blog community. As a designer at Market we explain the line and how it can be best used by quilters but there are so many fabric companies at Market and the buyers are so bombarded with sales pitches from all of the fabric companies that they don’t necessarily want to see everything.
A couple of years ago when we were launching our Prism Watercolors line, a lovely (we thought) line of medium and lighter-toned fabrics that later appeared in a very successful quilt in American Patchwork & Quilting, a distributor in Europe flat out told me that they weren’t interested in seeing anything with lighter tones because pastels wouldn’t sell in Europe. A whole continent of sales gone because the distributor wouldn’t even look at the line.
Despite the long process it takes for a design to become fabric, it is a thrill to see bolts in shops. On a trip last year to Tokyo my heart skipped a beat when I saw our fabrics on the shelves in a quilting store there. So in a month I’ll go to Houston, hope for a good reception to our new line, come home and start the process all over again.
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