Crafty Manolo

I think I’ll let the creator speak as to the many varied usages for this… this.

you can make bridal shower more fun with
Order a special treat for kids’ birthday parties or baby shower
for a memorable anniversary party favor
Make birth announcements even sweeter
new customer gift and/or client “Thank You’s
Reward your employees with inexpensive sweet treats for outstanding customer service, project success or other milestones.
Create personalized, affordable wedding favors

Imagine, if you will, hauling this out at a baby shower. Imagine the reaction if this was your wedding favor to your guests. Hmmm… maybe the seller meant that blurb to be about other items at the shop. After all, at $215.00, this isn’t what I would call an inexpensive sweet treat as a reward to employees, either.

Let’s just take another look, shall we?

Yeah, no, still not seeing it as a great idea to cement customer loyalty.

But maybe gloves just aren’t the thing you want to use to make your birth announcement even sweeter. Maybe you would prefer something more like this festive Recycled Bra Head Accessory to wear to the christening:

Look how beautifully it displays the underwire. And the little yellow bird desperately plotting its escape makes it Art.

Look, I’m as fond as the next girl of a good upcycle or a clever bit of repurposing. I just think it bears repeating – and often – that just because someone thought of it doesn’t make it a good idea.

I’ve never been a fan of dressing up animals in human clothes. I deal in my own way with the fact that so many people take poor, defenseless dogs and put them in silly hats or little Sherlock Holmes costumes, or whatever. But cats….

The majority of us who live among cats would never dream of doing such a thing. We know who’s in charge around the scatter. I’ll give the rest of you a hint: if you have two legs? It ain’t you.

And yet today I was pointed in the direction of a blog where I saw this:

Someone had to make that terrifying outfit, get the cat to wear it and sit still, and come up with that… cake, for lack of a better descriptor.

But that’s not all. Oh no, it’s not.

(more…)

This gentleman is known as Greasy V. The picture of him is from the fabulous Carrieoke’s Knitting Blog. She stopped posting in May, but her archives are still around, featuring a lot of great projects and fun commentary on her life.

Anyway, as you can plainly see, Greasy V is not really well-versed in the art of knitting. I mean, we can see that, because we know what knitting actually looks like. There are a lot of people who would never see what was wrong with that picture.

Which reminds me of my bookselling days. Ah yes, once upon a time I worked in book stores. In one of them, I ran the fiction section. In that section resided a novel entitled The Lacemaker. I have long since forgotten who wrote it, and I never actually read it. I do recall that it was the harrowing tale of a French lacemaker who got caught up in the horror following the revolution. In point of fact, a surprising number of lacemakers, silversmiths, pastry chefs, silk weavers, and other crafts people did wind up facing the guillotine during the Reign of Terror for their part in supplying the crass material desires of the nobles who had already died.

But I digress.

What I remember most about that book is the cover. On it, a lovely young woman sits at her lace pillow before an open window, allowing plenty of light and fresh air into the room. She’s making an elaborate border… with just three bobbins on her pillow, one of which she’s holding roughly two feet in the air!

Anyone who has ever seen bobbin lace made knows you don’t haul your bobbins randomly into the stratosphere, and you can’t make a pattern with just three bobbins. And anyone who knows how lace was typically made for commercial purposes in eighteenth-century Europe is well aware that the workers rarely sat alone in well-lit rooms. More often they were clustered in groups around a single candle in a room with no open windows and no fire, for fear that dirt or smoke might discolor the lace.

And so it was that every time I shelved a copy of that novel, I giggled a little.

What about you? Have you seen someone illustrate or attempt to explain your craft and get it completely wrong?

First off, I’d like to apologize for the lack of posts the last couple days. I was sick and my eyes wouldn’t focus through the fever, alas. It’s difficult to spell properly under those circumstances, and my prose becomes somewhat… less than exquisite. Oh hell, in point of fact I become more garbled than Ozzy Osborne on helium. Not pretty.

Anyway.

In honor of the fever dreams that plagued my last couple days, I bring you some thoughts on crafts gone horribly wrong.

 (Photo via Wonyk)

We all have crafting ideas. Some, admittedly, are better than others. What possessed the artist to create a teddy bear our of belly button lint and then enclose it in a glass jar, I cannot say. I occurs to me that I might have looked for a led-lined enclosure, but maybe that’s just me.

The poor thing, while articulated, which is something of a feat in that scale, appears to have been put together like Frankenstein’s monster out of mismatched bits of other teddy  bears who had passed on. Even the eyes appear to be two different sizes.

And yet, somehow, there is a bizarre poetry – possibly strongly influenced by Richard Brautigan – to the concept of making an adorable little toy out of something as pointless, unpleasant, and just plain nasty as belly button lint. Just think how long one would have to harvest the materials to come up with enough lint to make this small, bedraggled creature! Even if you had friends lining up to donate their own fluff, it would take a ridiculously long time. This tenacity and originality of vision seems to me to be worthy of a certain admiration, even if the results are less than stellar.

Yes, I doff my entire hat collection to the few, the proud, the ones who come up with utterly deranged crafts projects while in the throes of too much pizza and beer, an excess of video games, or just plain deeply confused mental states. Whether or not you add very much to the sum total of greatness in the world, you certainly add to its whimsicality and unpredictable nature.

So, belly button lint teddy bear maker, I salute you.

 (turkey bread basket project via Family Fun)

So.

It’s now November. Thanksgiving is a couple mere weeks away. I thought it might be fun to do a roundup of the best holiday projects so you, my crafty friends, would have some great stuff to do for your tables. This bread basket was the best I found.

For most holidays, it’s easy to find a great mix of glorious and ghastly projects.. but something about Thanksgiving seems to bring out the worst in crafters. I get that most of the projects are aimed at kids, and mostly at teaching them fairly questionable history, at that. I get that toilet paper roll pilgrims and clothespin turkeys are easy for little hands. But I find it difficult to believe that a holiday centered around the table cannot produce serious, adult, elegant craft.

Have you got a great Thanksgiving project? Seen one on the net? Tell me all about it!

That poor pooch!

Okay, I’m going to come right out and say this: I really, really dislike the practice of dressing up pets. I find it undignified. That’s my personal opinion, and I’m sticking by it. Your mileage may vary, and we won’t have a problem about that as long as you aren’t coming over to dress my cat up… not that you’d find him if you tried that. He’d be hiding and I would aid him in any way I could.

But even if you’re into dressing up the critturs in your life, would you really inflict this ‘Yoda’ costume on your pup? I wouldn’t. In fact, the expression on this poor, forlorn canine really sums up my feelings on the subject.

On the other hand, I have to admit I could see a use for the crocheted light saber rattles. Same artist, much cooler result. In fact, I have some terribly pro-creative friends who are huge Star Wars nerds, too. If they present the world with another tiny one, I know what to give as a baby present!

There’s nothing like a warm, snuggly quilt to make you feel cosy at night. And a hand-made one warms you with the love stitched into it, too, right?

Well, sometimes no matter how much love went in, it’s still the stuff of nightmares.

Poor Thomas the Tank Engine! He’s got the dreaded green chicken pox! Who could get a good nights’ sleep under that?

You can goggle at Thomas the Pox-Ridden Tank Engine and a couple dozen other cautionary tales in quilting at About.Com Quilting in the Pictures of Ugly Quilts Gallery.

While some of the quilts merely represent a little wonky construction work or a slightly off color choice, there are others that might well induce seizures, like this one:

Each monstrous example has been lovingly (or not so) entered and described by its creator.

There’s a comments section where you can send love, pity, or suggestions for how to make prettier quilts to the creators of these deathless bed covers. So if you have any good advice for these quilters, go thou and tell it on that mountain!

Or, you know, just gawk at the scary.

We all know there are evil people out there in the cold, cold world. Most of us have met at least one of them, and many of us have been duped, mistreated, etc. by more than one.

Most of us, however, assume that we won’t find them in the crafting community. Not here!

But the principal of caveat emptor is an important one with us, too. If you doubt me, please head over to Regretsy and read this takedown of several Etsy ‘crafters’ who have simply taken someone else’s work and listed it as their own, often using the exact same text as the originator’s. Yeah, stealing pictures and descriptions, and then charging more.

Seriously, folks, this is something we all need to be aware is going on. After all, we want to support original artists and get our money’s worth, not simply give our hard-earned cash to fakers who more than likely will never send us the products we ordered. After all, actually buying the pieces and mailing them out would cut into those precious profits!

Keep a weather eye open and don’t get duped.

Okay, there are some things in life that are just plain wrong. One of them, in my not so humble opinion, is 3-D sushi on your chest complete with actual chopsticks skewered to your sweater just below your chin. Talk about a passion killer! Even if your honey did want to gobble you up in this getup, there’s the issue of how (s)he could be impaled on those pointy bits of wood.

Then again, if your SO is a sparkly vampire…

… and you’re worried about the consequences of getting too close might entail, but you aren’t best buds with Buffy the Vampire Slayer,

… maybe, just maybe, there’s an excuse to wear this.

But seriously? Even Willow at her most sartorially challenged…

… probably wouldn’t be caught dead in this one.