kattitudes

I found a new place I love to visit; Craft Critique. It started because they ever so kindly included Kattitudes in their Halloween Carnival, so of course I had to pop over to see what that included.

What I found was a perfectly delightful place that did just what the banner advertises; gives opinions on all types of subjects surrounding types of crafts. Which basically means they test all varieties of crafty matters and tell you how it works for them. And they make crafty goods with what they test and show you how they did it along with some fantastic photo work, which is even better.

I didn’t spend ages over there, but I poked around for a while and could see losing a *lot* of time there. Eek. Another time sucker. That’s bad and good all at once. But hey, they have great photos and even in the short time I was there, I came away with a few ideas for things to post over here. And I figure any place that can inspire me that quickly deserves a good decent “please go look over there and see the good treats available”.

Give them a visit and see what type of craft you are inspired to do.

via Craft Critique

Have you every wondered how jewelers make these types of pieces? Well, many of us make our own tool templates, but I think they all can be traced back to the original WigJig.

WigJig is amazing. Frankly, I don’t even know who they are or how they started, but I have cruised their absolutely incredible treasure trove of a website repeatedly.

It’s like Christmas morning for me, not so much for the jewelry pictures (surprising, I know) but for the knowledge! There is *so* much knowledge all jammed up together in such a small space that it’s almost like trying to mash a square peg in a round hole. I am determined to get the information in my brain, by hook or by crook!

Listen, I confess. The website itself has so much on it that I find it a little challenging to navigate, but that is the obsessive-compulsive and anal-retentive in me speaking. I code just enough that it makes my fingers itch to want to get in there and logically organize and alphabetize and make it all foo-foo and pretty.

The focus of the wigjig website is the knowledge, not the pretty foo-foo, so even if it is hard to shuffle through for you - stick with it because the information there is just amazing. You will learn. so. much!

Even if you suffer information overload, this website is worth visiting over and over. The techniques you will learn will be worth every single moment spent.

Now let’s face it. Yes, you can create your own wigjigs at your own home with your own supplies. If you have it in you to do it, then by all means, go for it. I just don’t. It is easier for me to support wigjig.com and send them the small amount they need in exchange for the immense amount of education they provide.

Even if you do not have the budget to purchase their fine products right now, the information they provide is free of charge. Take advantage of free! A little education is always *always* a good thing. Never pass up free knowledge. And for all those people that are always searching: yes, I believe they do teach you a few different ways to wire wrap briolette stones.

Now the other neat thing to realize is that once you have the education in your brain, and once you see the pattern of how to make these fantastical pieces, you can go on to make more than just jewelry pieces. You can whip out gorgeous things like these amazing suncatchers:

And you have to admit, gifts like these have the potential to leave your recipient speechless due to your awesome “you can literally make anythingness”.

Furthermore, if you don’t feel like giving them away, you can sit at home and decorate your Christmas tree with amazing little numbers like this cute thing:

So brew up a cuppa, and find yourself a few minutes (or an hour) and sit back. Explore wigjig.com and learn some tricks. If you can spare the change, buy yourself a template so you can make some beautiful music (or more acurately, pieces). Or, if you are more crafty than that, use the instructions so kindly and lovingly provided by the Powers That Be at Wigjig.com and create your own templates.

Either way, get yourself a template and get creating. You will find yourself making wild wacky wonderful pieces of incredible art in no time whatsoever. Then, like me, you will find that the hardest part is letting them go! Seriously - I make these utterly gorgeous pieces for friends and family as gifts….and end up having to make two just so I can let one go away from me.

Thanks wigjig.com, for making all this information and education available to us. Keep doing what you are doing, because we love it.

via Wigjig website

As I’ve said in the past, I lived in London for a number of years, and would move there again so quickly that it would make your head spin, if the opportunity presented itself (are you listening, Opportunity? Please knock. Please.)

I spent every. single. day. out walking the pavement, determined to memorize that city inside and out. And in the process, I actually did discover some pretty fantastic places, peoples and things.

One of the places that I discovered (it’s definitely not a “new” discovery, but it fits our purposes here) was the Victoria and Albert Museum. What an incredible treasure. It’s a different type of establishment - not so much a “oh, come look at the displays”, but more a repository of arts and crafts of a depth and breadth that even the most creative of us could not possibly plumb in one lifetime.

Every visit was like Christmas. Each display would yield up some new amazing treasure, from a display of the finest wrought laces (and you know my obsession with lace) to the everyday silverplate on loan from simple country churches to furniture to tapestries to pottery to you name it. The common thread is how each person told their stories through the items they made with their own two hands. If it is an art or a craft, it is in there.

It comes as no surprise that my favorite display was the closet (tongue-in-cheek here) of jewelry. I say closet because that booger was locked down tighter than you could possibly believe. Two doors only. It was enough to give a claustrophobic person fits (or so it it would seem). The entrance was a one-way only floor to ceiling barred turnstile number that would fit one person at a time, and a physically guarded exit turnstile at the rear of the two room area. The two rooms were filled with jewels and adornments such as a jewelry addict (named Kat) could ever hope to want. Of course, there were items in the cases that made you convinced that their presence had to be a practical joke of some sort. Still, it was amazing.

It is a wealth of work. Each individual piece in that building represents the work of an artist, even if the artist was a simple Joe Average, sitting down with crafting tool in hand. Queen Victoria (one of my heroines, if for nothing else than having the one of the greatest love stories in the known world) was wise enough to recognize the value and beauty in the creative work of the common individual. And even still, one of the very many things I appreciated during my visits was the inclusion of art work and pieces done by current students of local art schools within the greater London area. What an opportunity.

Anyway, I cannot recommend this place enough. Even if you physically never get an opportunity to walk through the doors, visit frequently online. The curators do an excellent job of updating their various website arenas with information, making their particular area a veritable treasure chest, just waiting for you to find your own jewel in the crown. Reach in and grab some knowledge and see what people were making ten, twenty, one hundred and a thousand years ago. The creativity you will find may fill you with wonder, but hopefully, it will also fill you with inspiration!

In fact, if that was not enough to get you there, one last push to make you visit. The V&A has dedicated a huge section online to knitters. Yes, there is a huge section set aside with patterns and history and examples and more information than you could read in a month. Have at it.

(And as a PS for those that might consider stopping by if you are in or around London way [for those of us not blessed enough to live there anymore] the V&A is literally down the street from Harrods, so if you get a hankering to see how current commercial crafts are being made, you could get in a little of that type of educational effort too. Goodness knows I did more than my fair share of that.)

via Victoria and Albert Museum

One of the fun things about marrying a super king geek Mister is that we get to be early adopters for so many cool and neato toys. But it also means that a lot of our electronics are just fugly beyond words. Neat to play with, but just not always pretty.

Not a problem anymore, now that we have found silly funky SKYNmobile, where, for the price of a few manicures (which we have been sorely lax about anyway) we can redecorate all of our laptops on a whim (but we are leaving the sacred Viao alone. We don’t mess with our baby V.)

Usually, we are hands off with silly stuff like this, but the makers claim that the skins are not only reusable, but that they will remove cleanly. And with the sizes available ranging from 12 to 17 inches, there is one to fit most standard laptops out there. Hey, with that type of a sales pitch, we can see trying this at least once. Forty dollars is more than a little steep for our tastes, honestly, but it is tempting. Maybe one of those silly things to put on a Christmas wish list.

via: SKYNmobile