Whether you knit or sew, baby booties seem to have the perfect mix of a craft project: quick, satisfying, a great gift, and a guaranteed ‘cute’. The beautiful booties pictured above are by Heather Bailey. She’s generously added her pattern for these Bitty Booties to her Free Pattern downloads. Check it out, and when you’re done, be sure to add your photos to the Bitty Booties group on Flickr!

I am really excited to see a few entries for the whiplash introductions.
I have had to delete a couple of entries, one that were not to a static page, and two that linked to items on sale at etsy. I didn’t really say anthing about this before, not thinking it an issue, but linking to an item that is for sale, on site such as etsy or ebay or on a commercial retail or online store will not be allowed - sorry about that.

A couple of initial entries that have caught my eye so far are for tutorials.
the finger knitted and then felted worms that have been made into ‘butt cushions‘ are fabulous. This blog is called Hildes hekle-strikkeri-hurra! Hilde’s place for crocheting and knitting. by Hilde in Oslo, Norway.

and the nuno felting tutorial at Helenes side blog i thought was very interesting as well.

This awesome dress is made from a textile woven from recycled audio cassette tapes.

It’s possible to ‘listen’ to the fabric by running a tape head over the fabric!

You can purchase items made from the fabric here at Sonic Fabric, including yardage of the fabric.

Crochet pliably lends itself to freestyle form-making… so there are many artists who use crochet for making three-dimensional forms. This artist, louise weaver crochets soft coverings to fit over taxidermist models. She also combines found objects into the work. Here is a raccoon with a plastic-duster tail

There are also some images of her work on Flickr from the Armory Art show in NY this spring.

I found this via We make money not art.

Chris Keenan makes amongst the most beautiful ceramics I know. It’s a combination of shapes and glazes that attracts me. All the work is thrown porcelain from Limoges, glazed using combinations of tenmoku (the dark, almost black glaze) and a deep celadon (the pale green-gray glaze), and then reduction-fired in a gas kiln to 1280° C.

Keenan started his professional life as an actor before traingin to be a potter as apprentice to Edmund de Waal.

Keenan says about his work: “A particular love of the bowl continues to offer formal and technical challenges - I feel I could make them until the cows come home and still experience near equal degrees of satisfaction and frustration.” I really like this idea of exploring and researching a certain shape or function over and over again.

Chris Keenan will be exhibiting at the new London craft fair Origin in October.