My grandmother never threw anything away, and kept all of her possessions in pristine order. As a child, this was a little hard to deal with -- don't sit on the bedspread, no shoes on the couch, fold the towel after you dry your hands -- but as an adult I've come to appreciate her fastidious care of her items, some of which I now possess and thoroughly enjoy.

This WWII Army Housewife bag is one of my favorite hand-me-downs. Apparently, it included a sewing kit back when it was issued, and these kits were issued by the Brits and the Swiss as well. Nowadays, this little Army Housewife bag holds my jewelry on overnight trips. And it makes me smile every time I look at it.

When I started to think about making gifts for my family, I decided that I wanted to try and capture that same smile-inducing nostalgia for my relatives. Since we've got a few silkscreen-type machines in the office, I thought I'd beg one friend to make me a design and another friend to show me how to use the Yudu machine (I've used the Gocco printer before, but wanted to try a new device).

I'm loving the results! So much that I've now screen-printed about 12 bags and 8 dish towels, and am wondering if I can get away with giving nothing but self-branded textiles for all my gifts. (And thanks to Daniel and Brookelynn for helping me out, not to mention everyone else who helped with the manual labor in the name of learning!)

This is a lovely detail from a felted rug, handmade by Tanis Alexis. Tanis is a fiber artist, mom, contributor to Feltique, and a spectacular artist. She creates classic pieces of felt, but with a multimedia twist! Each rug is wet felted from 100% wool, and then the city scene is added with a limited edition cut stencil. Tanis will make this piece custom, in about 3-6 weeks.

Andrea Dezso is an artist in a wide variety of media (animation, sculpture, book design, fibers), and while her heart embroidery from 2004 isn't new, it is certainly impressive.

More:

Pricked: Extreme Embroidery

At Maker Faire 2009 I had the pleasure of meeting Velma of COLORBOMB Creations. Velma is a colorful explosion of enthusiasm and fiber arts. She has a great etsy shop with amazing offerings, and yesterday on her blog VelmasWorld, she announced a new product, called SmorgasBombs. They will be launched at SOAR, the Spin-Off Autumn Retreat happening in Oregon next week. Not fair, cause I want to buy one right now!!!

Packaged in plastic bags re-claimed from the Sock Summit dumpster, each SmorgasBOMB contains 4 ounces/115 grams of animal fiber. This batch may contain any/all of the following breeds: Babydoll Southdown, Cheviot, Coopworth, Cormo, Corriedale, Cotswold, CVM, Dorset, Lincoln, Merino, Mohair, Rambouillet, Romney, Targhee, Wensleydale.

Janet Echelman is a public artist who makes large-scale fiber works. This one, called Her Secret is Patience, is in Phoenix, Arizona, and is made from painted galvanized steel and recyclable high-tenacity polyester braided twine netting. Janet is featured in the latest issue of Fiber Arts Magazine.

Rachel spotted a beautiful version of the Ruffle Scarf inspiration I shared for the Me, My Scarf, and I Singer Sewing Challenge. It was created by Sadie Fox, who has the scarf up on her own blog, and posted on Wardrobe ReFashion. Her site has a ton of fun fashion projects with clever recycled and repurposed twists. I love the color she chose for her scarf, it just looks so great on her, and I hope she had a great time wearing it to the musical Wicked! I also hope that you will enter the contest, for a chance to win a Singer Serger.

This needle felted dragon is awfully life-like for being a mythical beast! The work is quite impressive! From the artist, tallydragon, on deviantart.com:

He is made out of natural wools from the Iron Horse Farm, a local fiber farm, and the Flying Ewe, a fiber arts website. He has a wire understructure through most of his body that makes his wings, legs, and tail moderately poseable--the tail is extra long so that it can curl around the finger its sitting on. He's got glass eyes held in by glue and wires, and his horns are made out of wire covered in apoxie sculpt, topped with acrylic paint and matte varnish.

[Thanks, Eric Russell!]

Fall is in the air, and I'm feeling a need to embroider. If you're like me, you have an enormous pile of yarn left over from other projects. In my case, it sits in my needlework bag and taunts me, daring me to dig into it and make something pretty. So, one early fall afternoon with Vivaldi's Autumn Allegro playing on iTunes, I took the challenge. Using one of the butcher linen placemats from my Felix Populi product line, I set about laying down some fall foliage in yarn.

I'm in love with this stoic, macabre plush owl by Ann Wood. [Thanks, Sean!]

Artist Andrew Salomone writes:

It occurred to me that needleworkers used to have to make patterns and images to decorate fabric in the same way that contemporary music producers make beats and musical compositions by repeating and layering audio samples in digital sound editing programs. So the files created using digital editing programs today basically function in the same way that needlework samplers did in the days when all embroidery had to be done by hand.

So he made this Breakbeats Sampler, featuring waveforms for some common breakbeats, lovingly stitched on fabric. I'm guessing the natural next step would be to make each breakbeat playable with a soft switch.

I'm proud to announce the opening of Open Source Embroidery, an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art on October 2. It's a great show with lots of crafts intersecting technology, including my LilyPad Embroidery piece. The show has traveled all the way from Sweden and looks truly fabulous. You can check out pictures of what the exhibition looked like at the Bildmuseet in Umeå, or stop by in person when the show opens in SF; I highly recommend it!

Open Source Embroidery

October 2, 2009 through January 24, 2010
Museum of Craft and Folk Art
51 Yerba Buena Lane
San Francisco, CA 94103
(@ Mission between Third & Fourth)

More:

LilyPad Arduino Embroidery

Talk about extreme craft! This gorgeous textile is an 11-foot-long weaving made from spider silk, specifically the golden orb spider of Madagascar. The story of how it was made is fascinating and well worth reading (a few tidbits: the saffron color is the undyed color of the spider silk, the threads have five times the strength of steel by weight, and it took more than one million spiders to make the cloth). The weaving will be on display in the American Museum of Natural History for the next six months, so if you're on the east coast, you should go look! Check out the New York Times article for more details on the history of humans using spider silk and how this particular piece was made. It's an amazing account that lives at the intersection of tradition and technology, science and art, craft and craziness.

Over at Teagan Tall, Katie Wilson writes:

It is a compliment to say I mistook Finish artist Anu Tuominen's outdoor clothespin installation for a domestic-bent Andy Goldsworthy. Her meticulous organization of color and object are reminiscent too of any number of arrange-by-color artists, and yet Tuominen gently declines comparison.

This week I am loving the special way that lavender and green play off each other. Such a dynamic color pairing. Herb Garden yarn from Beck and Call Girl on Etsy has just the right dusky light purples mixed with just the right greens.

Manspun Yarns are the creation of Mathieu. Imagine a lumberjack who chops trees into endless yards of yarn! Imagine a weightlifter who can bench press 1 million skeins! Imagine a man from Canada who sells his own hand spun and hand dyed yarns, is active on ravelery, and spent today spinning in public! That Canadian man is Mathieu.

I'm going to let you hear more about him, from him, in his own very manly all lowercase voice:

i'm a man. i spin yarn. i knit.

i also breath and eat and drink and play guitar and video games. many people are confused when they think of "man" and "yarn" in the same sentence, but they do in fact go together.

i'm relatively new to the world of yarn, spinning and knitting. i've known for a few years the basics of how to do things, but got really hardcore into things about a year and a half ago during a weekend spin-along in the Novelty and Art Yarns group on Ravelry (http://www.ravelry.com/groups/novelty-and-art-yarn-spinners).

i'd probably have to say that i mostly prefer assembling (the manly word for spinning) Merino Wool and Bamboo into my manly yarns, and although many sheep have to live colder lives and many pandas go hungry, they know it's for the good of mankind. i use a Majacraft Little Gem for yarn assemblage, but because "Little Gem" sounds kind of wimpy, i refer to it instead as "Little Bastard"

If you feel like you can handle the testosterone- Find him on Ravelry. Find him on Flickr. Buy his yarn at his online store. Read his blog.

Saturday is World Wide Spin in Public Day! That's tomorrow, so grab your spindles and find a Spin in Public event to visit. If you already know how to spin, get out there and try to teach someone who has never tried it. If you don't know, it's the perfect excuse to learn. Oh, and many thanks to Manspun for sending us the info on the event. Little did he know that I have a special place in my heart for men who spin! I'll be profiling him tomorrow, so check back for that!

In honor of WWSIP Day, I want to introduce you to two of my friends, Buck and Greg. They are obsessed with spinning. For them, every single day is Spin in Public Day! They run a roadside fiber stand in Monte Rio, a little hamlet on the Russian River in Sonoma County, California. Their shop is called Two Guyz Spinning, and Tuesday through Sunday, the "Two Guyz" set up their wares and set up their wheel, and then they spin.

What I love the most about them is their unconventional take on fiber arts. Buck and Greg are dedicated to living from the earth, and that includes their yarn-making techniques. Their unique take starts with the fibers that they spin. They spin sheep's wools like dorset and churro. They spin other animal fibers like alpaca and Kashmir goat. And they spin plant fibers like flax, bamboo, and hemp. The yarn Greg is showing off in the photo is some of his wolf yarn, and its just to die for. Buck and Greg take it to the next level when they spin fibers like wolf and wildcrafted bison. Collecting bison is tricky, because conservation laws prevent taking wool from any of the national parks like Yellowstone, where the herds live. Instead, the gatherers wait for the bison to leave the boundaries of the park to calve, and then take the fibers that are left behind.

By Lindsey North, projects intern

As readers of CRAFT and MAKE know, finding materials for projects can sometimes be challenging, if not downright maddening. I've spent hours online looking for very specialized materials that appear to be as mythical as unicorns. And even when you know exactly what you're after, you have to surf the web looking for the best deals.

To make CRAFT's Crocheted Wooden Bowl project by Vickie Howell, I remember hunting for yarn made from pineapple fibers that would be used to crochet around the wooden bowl to add decoration and color.

Pineapple fiber yarn! Come on! Where do you find that?

I searched online and learned that pineapple fiber is commonly called pina or piña. I called every yarn store in Sonoma County and then started calling the bigger stores in San Francisco. I couldn't find what I wanted.

So I did a general search and found Knit Purl, a store in Portland, Oregon, that carried the whole line of alternate-fiber yarns. These were made from various barks and leaves, and dyed with amazing colors; the saturation and hue reminded me of a florist's shop. And they had pineapple yarn! Theirs is called fique (fee-kay) and is made from a relative of the commercial pineapple plant. The store owners were very helpful, as they allowed me to pay over the phone and shipped the yarn to me. Knit Purl is the place to go for strange and awesome yarns. At this point in my crafting career that has been my greatest acquisitional challenge.

I had a blast working on this project after I found the yarn and some wooden bowls that didn't "cost an arm and a leg." (I would have a hard time spending big bucks on something I'm just going to drill holes in.) Returning to the Craft Lab, I measured and marked the points where I would be drilling my wooden bowls. (Measuring is very important and should never be skipped ever if you are a trained professional.)

Then I crocheted my way around the bowl, slowly decreasing as I got closer to the base. I ended the last ring around the base, and wove the end back in. This bowl looks totally awesome when it is full of fruit -- or balls of hard-to-find yarn.

Your CRAFT intern,
Lindsey

Moxie's been feltin' up some new work! This "Specimen 2" from her Apoca-Galápagos Series is going to the Plush You! show at Schmancy in Seattle in October.

Moxie recently posted some of her new work for the Plush You show in October. Her art is created with needle felting, and her technique is unparalleled. This plug is a boutonniere, part of her series on the subject. It's a great take on the traditional red rose! Her Apoca-Galapagos series of creatures having evolved or sought shelter in the discards of society is even more irreverent. I love Plush You, and this is a great contribution.

101: Natural Dyeing
Everyday plants offer big color.
By Judith Lange

Imagine a world with no colored fabric. Look in your closet, at your furniture, at your towels and your curtains. Imagine everyone dressed only in white. Such a drab existence does not suit human beings. Long before Rit came in packets, color was everywhere. Beautiful colors were produced from plants, wood scraps, mud, shellfish, even bugs.

My friends and I once spent an entire summer experimenting with natural dyes. It was a fun way to bring more color into our lives; it's sure to be the same for you. Many natural sources of dye are still available today and are simple to use. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to dye wool using the ubiquitous onionskin. This is a grand project for adults and children, singly or in groups (supervise children!).

I am in love with a new tool. It's a simple Ashford Flick Card. I have had my eye on a pair of $60 hand carders for a while, but this flick card was less than $20, so I went for it. The card is basically a brush with thin, sharp, bent teeth. Interestingly enough, I found the tool at my local feed store, not the craft store.

I frequently travel all around with tons of wool roving. This year alone I've done almost 10 events to promote Feltique, taking all my supplies and letting people learn about felt. And while wool roving is relatively inexpensive and easy to store, some wool in my collection has been toted around with me for literally 3 years. The wool begins to naturally felt to itself, pick up lint and bits of debris, and in general become messy looking. And no one wants to make art with a cruddy looking tangled lock of fleece. That's where the flick card comes in.

While watching a movie last night, I sat on the couch and pawed thru my pile of roving, matching up colors and combing them out. I didn't really have a technique, I just stuck the locks onto the teeth of the comb, and brushed them. I picked the wool off, then brushed it again, repeating until all the tangles had been pulled out. The result is as if I went shopping and bought all new supplies. Having fresh fluffy piles of color is really inspiring. I can't believe I waited so long to get one of these tools!

Sean @ MAKE writes:

Tristin Lowe is the artist behind this 50-foot whale made of industrial felt over an inflatable form. No jokes about the name, please.

I love this video of Canadian textile artist Evelyn Roth's work crocheted from recycled video tape including a car cozy and several outfits. (Thanks, Erica!)

More:

Knitted Interfaces for Technology

Your Friendly Neighborhood Organ Grinder is an Etsy shop filled with crafty organs of all sorts. Brains, eyeballs and more all mashed up with keychains, hair clips, in jars, on walls, you name it. Via Street Anatomy.

Via Mr. X Stitch, I love Ben Conrad's anatomical embroideries!

Jo Hamilton creates these stunning portraits in crochet, based on photographs. They remind me of pastel drawing, but using stitches instead of smudges. (Thanks, Andrew Salomone!)

Happy Apollo 11 lunar mission 40th anniversary, everybody! Beche-la-mer made this stunning embroidery piece using a topographical map of the moon as reference. Look at all those french knots! Via Mr. X Stitch.

Happy Caturday crafters, here's some super cute felt work by Victor Dubrovsky. (Thanks, Marc!)

Artist Andrew Salomone embroidered this sweater for Amy Winehouse with all her tattoos in all the right places. It'd keep her publicly recognizable, but warm at the same time:

About 9 months ago I heard something about Amy Winehouse having health issues. Then I noticed that Amy Winehouse never seemed to be wearing a lot of clothes in any of the pictures I saw of her. I also noticed that she changed her look very often and looked drastically different from picture to picture. It occurred to me that maybe she felt like she had to wear revealing clothing in order to be recognized by showing off her distinctive tattoos. I found several pictures where it appears that even when she did wear warmer clothing, she was still forced to expose her tattoos.

Kit Lane created this fantastic needle-felted Jabba the Hut (The Early Years) for the Stitch Wars exhibit at Bear and Bird Boutique in Lauderhill, Florida. The show is a collection of handmade goods celebrating Star Wars.

Jabba is 100% wool with the exception of two beads, two glass eyes and quite tightly needle felted. He's not at all delicate and will only get better the more he's handled.

Jabba was the character that attracted me most from the Star Wars series. Even though he's quite a bad guy I imagined what he must have been like as a wee snot of a slug. You dont get to be a such a great naughty creature without some sort of trauma, his being a lover of his squeezly "bunnybear". The unmerciless taunting by his slime mates over his compulsion for plushies I suspect caused him to turn his back on a normal upbringing, turning instead to a life of crime.

You can see more pictures of the needle-felted Jabba the Hut in Kit's Flickr Stream.