Pink of Perfection

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Until three years ago, craft fairs came in your standard grandma, dried eucalptus, church lawn variety. Enter Chicagoan crafters and visionaries Sue Blatt and Kathleen Habbley. The two saw the craft movement gaining serious online momentum but realized there were no fairs to accomadate the new generation of crafters. And so in 2003, the Renegade Craft Fair was born in Chicago. Met with huge success, the duo brought the fair to Brooklyn’s McCarren Park last year, and their baby grew fast. This year there were nearly 200 vendors selling handmade goods: comic books, purses, cards and stationery, rock posters, puppets, t-shirts, jewelry, and pretty skirts.
Continue reading “Renegade Craft Fair” »

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Nothing captures my imagination quite like trash. Shopping in junk stores and thrift shops is my glorified version of recycling. I love that a discarded object gets a new meaning once it’s in a different context. It’s an enormous charge for me knowing a glass pitcher that was once filled with morning orange juice will now pour sangria at my barbecue.
Continue reading “One Woman’s Trash: How to Reupholster a Chair” »

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In my magical pretend life, I don’t ride the train for an hour each morning to sit cubicle-bound under a whirring air conditioner vent. My ideal lifestyle has more sun and more pajamas: I spend the early hours lolling around in bed drinking coffee out of brightly-hued latte bowls, the day pursuing creative endeavors, and the afternoon at yoga.
Continue reading “Look Ma! No Pattern: Sewing a Yoga Mat Bag” »

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Hand’s down, the biggest challenge in making an apartment look like a home is figuring out how to cover all those blank walls. Tapestries are so opium den and Monet posters are so wrong at this stage of life. I always cringe a little bit when the designers on Trading Spaces talk about “making art”, but they may be on to something. If you can’t afford to buy art on your assistant salary (and who can?), it just may be time to make some.
Continue reading “Drawn and Quartered: Horse Stencil” »

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Fine, I’ll admit it: I kind of like Valentine’s Day. I’ve heard the drill that it’s a fabricated holiday that too often involves drugstore chocolates and last minute roses picked up at the gas station, but as far as excuses for self-indulgence go, Valentine’s Day ranks pretty high. One can happily buy herself some fancy chocolates, a dozen hot pink roses, and raise her glass to the best reading material there is, the book of love!

Romance is just thoughtfulness directed at someone you smooch. How about sending sweet nothings this year to the loves you don’t lock lips with? They’re your friends, and they gracefully put up with a lot. They help you pick the paint color for your bathroom, indulge your grandiose theories of what makes good art, and mail you perfect gold shoes just because. Have you told them lately that you love them? If you can’t fete them in person with Rod Stewart and a sidecar, perhaps you should send them one of these rick rack valentines sealed with a kiss.

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I recently took the F train to heaven: a trimming store in New York’s fashion district with thirty foot ceilings and ribbons as far as the eye could see. They had unknown yards of velvet, silk, vintage, organza, grosgrain stripes, solids and polka dot ribbons (and this is to say nothing of the bolts of lace, tassels and some true trimming oddities). I was like Maria von Trapp spinning wildly in the hills of Austria; it really took all my self-restraint to not grab a world-weary shopkeeper by her shoulders, shake her, and exclaim that she works in the best place on earth.

Continue reading “Cheap and Easy: Ribbon Napkin Rings” »