Find me at the Handmade Mart on Sunday!

Things have been crazybusy with work and moving; I'm finally in (if not settled) my new apartment, finally finished with a massive work event, and about to star with 49 of my friends at the Handmade Mart, tomorrow in Silver Spring, Maryland. If you're in the greater DC area, you should stop by and see the fabulosity!

I'm stoked to be booth neighbors with Oh Ginger and have such fantastic crafters like This Chickadee and Tina Seamonster in attendance. (Find me at booth 3, near Fenton Street.) Click here for the official details, and click here to see my Q+A vendor profile!

Well I'll be.

I was really excited about Hello Craft's Summit of Awesome when I heard about it at the beginning of the year. People who I admired? Check. Full of useful information? Check. And IN DC (coughnotNewYork)? Check!

And then, of course, I realized it was the same weekend by which I needed to vacate my house. Dammit.

So I've sadly watched teh intarwebs get all abuzz about the Summit, about how fantastic it was going to be, about what neat people they have booked to speak to attendees. While I am excited about my big changes that are coming that weekend, I was sad that it had to coincide with such a cool event. I thought about going, but I couldn't justify spending money just to purposely neglect my moving responsibilities.

This weekend, though, I saw that a one-day pass was being given away. And, well, if I wasn't paying for the privilege of not packing... I decided to toss my ring in the hat.

And I'll be damned if that doesn't work out on occasion.

See you Saturday! I'll be the one stressing over whether I've properly cushioned my china when I ought to be paying attention to marketing and branding craftgasm.

Happy Earth Day!

I'm totally ganking and re-adapting Sara (from Girls Can Tell)'s idea for today's post. In honor of Earth Day, post your favorite eco-friendly shop in the comments. You can decide its eco-friendly-ness in whatever way you want -- using recycled materials, making a product that helps you create less waste, or making old things new again are all good definitions. You can give us a link to your own shop, but only if it meets the eco-friendly requirement AND if you link to another shop that is not yours that also is Earth-friendly. It's all about the community-building, folks. Spread the love! (To help you get started, here's a link to all tagged items from Team EcoEtsy members.)

One of my favorite shops for perusal is Chakra Pennywhistle, where you can find reclaimed fabrics made into sweet pillows like this one below. She's also a fellow Team EcoEtsy member like me, so that gives her some bonus points.

Lastly, in celebration of Earth Day, I'm offering a 20% discount on any item in the {craftgasm} Etsy shop! You have to order by the end of the day (I'm defining "end of the day" loosely -- just make sure the order is in before I wake up on Thursday morning), and in the "notes to seller" box at checkout, tell me your favorite eco-friendly tip. I may share the best tips here in the blog with a link back to whatever URL you'd like, so make 'em good!

I can't wait to see all the Earth-happy goodness you'll put in the comments!

Can I be six again?

Photo courtesy of and taken by Leanne at See the Woods and the Trees.

Following the Craftzine Twitter feed has never disappointed me, and paid off once again with this genius idea from See the Woods and the Trees, linked to this morning. Leanne helped her daughter make a four room dollhouse using reclaimed catalog pages and some cardboard. The result is so cute that it makes me want to have a toddler of my own just to have a socially-acceptable excuse to play with it.

I think it could be made even more eco-friendly by using old cereal boxes or somesuch reused material as the walls. Want a second story? Place another layer of cardboard on top of the first floor, then make another level. (This gives you the chance to paste a floor down, too.)

Best of all, since the dollhouse folds up, it doesn't have to take up a lot of room when it's put away. You could have dozens of setups ready for mixing and matching, and only use a few inches of bookshelf space to store it all.

How'd I get so lucky?

Floorplan courtesy of Dan; text, doors, and Easter-egg-looking radiator placement by me.

As I've mentioned, I'm getting ready to move in a few weeks. My boyfriend Dan and I just signed our lease yesterday for a one bedroom English basement in Dupont. It's very sweet, but as a one bedroom, it doesn't have a built in craft room, and we'll have to carve some space from the ample living room. We were trying different arrangements on the mostly-to-scale floorplan that Dan drew up last night, and I was stressing out, wondering if my extremely large, well-loved craft desk would fit and look right in the space.

Dan busied himself with the plan for a minute and before showing it to me said, "I don't know if I necessarily like or want this idea, but it's a thought."

He had drawn a bed in the living room's craft corner, leaving the entire bedroom open for crafting and office space.

Is it any wonder that I love this man?

Promos? Maybe some readers can help me.

I have an entire bookshelf full of papery goodness in the form of stock photography books. These are glossy, thick, pretty books that are given to advertising firms by photography companies to entice the agencies to buy the rights to their images. This means they are perfect for collage, ATCs, and all sorts of other forms of papercrafting. A friend of mine who works for an ad agency found out his office would be throwing an entire roomful of these fabulous books in the trash, and let me and Meigh of NoPantsMcGee in after hours to cart as many away as we could carry. She had a hand-me-down SUV at the time, and we loaded that thing's cargo area and backseat FULL of these heavy books.

Unfortunately, they are not going to all fit in my new apartment. I'm moving from a large three-level Victorian rowhouse with five bedrooms, five people, and seven built-in bookshelves (three of which I took over) to a one-bedroom English basement (zero built-ins). This means I need to come up with a way to get most of them out of my house before moving to the new place.

This is where you come in.

Since they're so pretty and useful for upcycled crafting, I don't want to just recycle them -- I want them to go toward MAKING. And since I want them to go toward making, and I also make things, I want to launch some sort of viral marketing campaign about {craftgasm}, with a free book for participants, perhaps. But the cost of mailing out books individually to people would be too cost-prohibitive to manage. (Is it acceptable to ask for $3 to ship a free item to someone?)

What genius ideas have I not come up with yet? Shoot 'em to me in the comments. (Best idea gets a book!)

Little Bunny Foo-Foo

I'm taking my first tentative steps into the world of plushies. Don't worry, I don't intend to start selling them at {craftgasm} just yet; this little guy is the first of a few gifts for baby-making friends of mine.

Because I know how much everyone loves a crappy cameraphone picture.

I found what looked like an easy-to-cut, easy-to-sew pattern from the lovely Wee Wonderfuls blog. The easy-to-cut part was right on the money, though I've found the instructions to be a little frustrating when one is doing this for the first time and also is cranky because she needs to eat her dinner, posthaste. For instance, after you sew the ears wrong-side together, there is no further instruction on flipping them right side out before sewing them onto the bunny. And the skinny nature of the ears makes it incredibly hard to do that anyway. I winged it by flipping them right side out with a big pin, a pencil with eraser (for inserting the pin), and a lot of tugging and patience. I hope they're not prematurely flipped, but it doesn't look like they are. (If so, I'll deal with that later and let you know.) Also, the instructions call for embroidering after he's sewn up, but my common sense said that would be better done now.

Turns out my sewing machine doesn't like small pieces of cotton jersey fabric (or big ones either, really), and since I was lazy and haven't added interfacing to them, I'm sewing this little dude up by hand as of right now. We'll see if I get frustrated enough to iron some interfacing on later.

In keeping with the {craftgasm} mantra, the fabric pieces are all reclaimed. The solid green and blue were stained t-shirts, and the blue gingham is leftover from someone else's crafting. The little bit of white and pink on the insides of the ears was scrap fabric left over after cutting quilt squares from an old baby onesie. The whole thing will probably be stuffed with fabric scraps when he's done, too; I dislike the feel of polyfil too much, especially for a baby. And since it might be entirely hand-sewn, I don't want the polyfil leaking out the sides after its first round in the washer.

Who could be frustrated with that sleeping little face for long? Probably a good thing, then, that his face was one of the first things I did. I'll try to remember that when I'm ready to set fire to the whole project after I'm all cramped up, needle in hand.

Happy Tuesday to me!

You may remember oohing and ahhing over the lovely little Accessories of Old shop in Bethesda that I talked about. Owner and blogger Lisa recently had a contest -- and I was ever so surprised to read tonight to find out I'd won! I hadn't been keeping up on my blog reading while trying to get everything finished for the Homespun Yarn Party, so when I clicked the article today, I was just curious as to what the winning idea was. Turns out it was mine! Thanks so much, Lisa!

I'll be receiving the little sheep figures to put theory into practice as decorative knobs for yarn baskets soon. To save Lisa the trouble of mailing them, I may just have to swing up to Bethesda and stop by the store again. Oh darn!

Lisa is currently hosting a giveaway of some seriously cute Easter-colored vintage items, and though telling you about it dilutes my chance of winning, I love you enough to do it anyway.

Your favorite crafter halfway through the day, as seen by Anne. The fabulous crafting apron is from Becky of This Chicakdee.

The Homespun Yarn Party was a huge success yesterday! There were TONS of people -- apparently there was a long line waiting for the noon opening, which can only be attributed to the excellent promotional work done by Paula of Woolarina and Jess (whose blog will be linked here once I'm able to find out if she has one).

Here's a low-quality camera phone picture of about 1/4 of the sellers' area.

I learned some bits about some of the items I make. For instance, reclaimed manila folder mini-journals sell faster than I can make them; the only evidence they ever existed is in the top photo because I found the materials on Friday, made them Saturday, and sold all of them Sunday. (They're the purple and vanilla colored notebooks up there.) Also, buttons are a hotter item among knitters than I'd ever thought, as long as they are buttons of skeins and sheep. And cards sell much better in packs than they do singly, so I'm thinking about packaging the existing ones up together, like with like. (Is it because they can be given as gifts, or because customers feel they're getting a better deal on 3 or 4 that they aren't with just one? What do you think?)

I also had a newly engaged couple inquire about custom work after looking at the reclaimed stationery sets -- they want envelopes made with specific maps' locations for their wedding invitations. I love the idea! I hope to work with them soon on those; I'd love to get more into custom orders.

The new-and-improved Reclaimed Stationery Sets, as taken by Anne.

I love when my little creations go out into the world and find happy homes. Thanks so much to all the folks who stopped by and said hello!

Incidentally, I am going to be rescuing several hundred maps from a prominent publisher's recycling bin tomorrow, and will need lots of new projects to make with them. If you have anything in mind, feel free to get in touch with me! They're 2' x 3' to 4' x 6' so they can be used for pretty much anything. (Need some wallpaper?)

Homespun Yarn Party tomorrow!

I don't have much free time because of tomorrow's craft fair, but I wanted to share these with you:


Ignore the messiness of the dining room table (and the low quality of my camera phone) and enjoy the prettypretty papers I've been playing with this week. These are now packaged up as the new and improved, all-maps-all-the-time Reclaimed + Upcycled Stationery Sets for the Homespun Yarn Party; they'll be in the craftgasm shop next week!

Can't wait until then? Stop by the Homespun Yarn Party from 12 - 5 on Sunday, March 15 and snap some up in person!