If whiplash isn’t enough and you need to find more…sometimes a challenge can be just the creative inspiration you need to try something new, or just try something. There are lots of them all over the internet - here are a few. They also offer the opportunity to see how others have responded to the same challenge, as most have galleries. You’re not tied as with a swap, but can participate or not according to your own whim and schedule. You may well know some of these - so please add others in the comments:

Photo Friday (weekly)

Illustration Friday(weekly)

Tie one on (aprons) (bimonthly)

Weekly challenges at Craftster

Use what you have month (monthly)

Ali Edwards’ AEzine contains a weekly challenge

Two Peas in a Bucket weekly scrapbooking challenge

Please do suggest other current worthwhile craft challenges you know and recommend in the comments. Maybe you’ve set up a great challenge with crafting friends, and could tell us about it?

u-handbag has done it again with a ‘rather cheeky’ purse tutorial.

Periodically I am sent books from publishers to review, check out and hopefully mention on whipup. When I do a review I try to see the good in a book, but of course I also look how it could be improved upon and if its interesting or different enough to want to actually buy it. I recently mentioned in the comments of a post how I go about doing a book review …

when I review a book, I look at it from various angles. design, layout, writing style, content. If I don’t personally like the book I try to look at it from another persons perspective - would this book be suitable for beginners, or as a source of inspiration.

If the book has some great features but is not up to scratch in some ways then I say that too. However I am not going to burn a book for not being everything for everyone, and I am not going to criticise a book harshly on one point when it may have other points in its favour. In this way perhaps I am diplomatic.

The aim of my reviews is to give readers a balanced view and a chance to see if this book might be suitable for them - if it is modern funky and hip I will say so, if it simple and basic and functional I say so, if it old fashioned or has a particular style I say all of those things so that the reader can decide for themselves if this is a book they might want to own.

What I want to know from readers is …. What do you look for in a book review?

miss gioia has made a tutorial for a cute stuffed patchwork cube

check out the winners of the softie awards. ::via craftzine ::softie awards

Your work must be of an original design in the needlearts areas of knitting, crochet, cross-stitch, needlepoint, or embroidery. Each needlearts category will have winners in the Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Levels. The contest entries are open from April 4 though May 31, 2007. ::stitch & pitch contest info

Since first seeing Anya Kivarkis’ jewellery a few years ago, I have been keeping an eye on her work…and am delighted to be seeing it popping up all over the net!!

…Having graduated with a BFA in Craft [Jewelry/Metalsmithing] from the University of Illinois and an MFA in Metal from the State University of New York, it is not suprising Anya’s collection of work is so beautiful and well considered. I love her visual language…the construction and deconstruction of shape and form and the play of the real against the surreal. Being a lover of history, I adore the glimpses of Victoriana seen in her pieces, through referencing doilies and lace…chadeliers and shadows. The partial hiding and simplification of form that she achives through dipping the work in resin {although it looks like glass enamel} really serves to give the work a highly modern edge. I really enjoy her colour palette of icy, juicy blues, stark whites {through the resin and blanched silver} and the burnt looking black edges…

Having recently won the prestigious ‘Emerging Artist’ award from Sienna Gallery it really does go to show what a bright light Anya Kivarkis will be from now on in the jewellery world. I am very much looking forward to seeing more work from her soon…..!!

Anya Kivarkis’ website seems to be down at the moment, but be sure to bookmark it for visiting in the future.

Kids are great - they always provide you with a lot of new information and contacts. So thanks to my daughters I know another woman with very special knitting ideas. (This time we have kids in the same music school.)

May I introduce: Marianne Joergensen, a gifted Danish artist who often uses her surroundings as a starting point for her art. In her work she connects events from the public or political stage with her individual and private life using techniques as sewing, knitting, gardening etc.

Last year she organized a major knitting project. Volunteers from many European countries and USA contributed nearly 4000 pink knitted and crochet squares. Outside Nikolaj, Contemporary Art Centre in Copenhagen, a small group of people sewed it all together and covered a tank with this piece of pink patchwork – as a critical statement on Denmark taking part in the Iraq war.

Knitting and crochet is as far away from war thinking as one can possibly imagine. These traditional female crafts signals quite other values such as home, care, proximity and time for reflection… whereas political involvement seems to be a quite overwhelming affair: where to start and where to end? However, most people can knit or crochet a square of 15×15 centimetres - and so a lot of people managed to state their opinion on war - by crafting!

Finally, the process of stitching the squares together over the top of the WW1 tank was documented with a video that was later shown at the exhibition TIME at Nicolaj.
Next Tuesday 10.th April at 20-22 it will be shown at Aarhus-filmvaerksted together with other videos documenting Marianne´s works. Afterwards there’ll be a discussion - where you can meet Marianne in person - if you should happen to drop by…

Jenn wrote in to tell me about an amazing hat ‘Billy Gibbons hat’ made by AfricanKelli - and after making it, she gave it away–wow. It is based on this hat.

Over the past fifteen years teaching children art, there have been references which have come and gone but there is one which stands the test of time for me. “Drawing with Children” by Mona Brooks, has always been a great source of inspiration to me. She now has 44 schools in the US, UK and Canada to teach her methods to both teachers and students. Her books are inspirational and the methods are easy to achieve good results with even the first time around. She has a second book geared for teens and adults too, which goes a bit deeper. A great resource for anyone who is interested in drawing, with or without children.

great tutorial from keyka lou on making a journal cover.

The first letter I ever remember receiving was a beautifully illustrated letter from my grandmother that combined words and homonyms that were illustrated. There was a picture of a deer and then my name which as a 9-year old I understood as Dear Weeks. There were so many other charming picture and word combinations that I remember crying when I found out someone had thrown it away. Another of my favorite letters is one I received from a friend right after the September 11th terrorist attacks in the US. In lieu of the beautiful handmade Christmas cards he usually makes, he wrote individual letters to everyone he loved telling us what they meant to him and what he had learned from each of us. I was so touched by the letter I received that I read it over and over.

This is why I was excited to learn of Felicia Sullivan’s new challenge to encourage letter writing. For me the process of writing a letter is a bigger commitment of time and energy so I think more carefully about what I’m going to say. I don’t want the letter to look sloppy so I have to slow down so my penmanship conveys the sincerity of my thoughts.

The most meaningful letters I exchange right now are with the foster family in China who took care of our adopted daughter for the first 300 days of her life. They write to us once every year or two in Chinese and we have a friend translate their letter to us and our letter back to them. Although someone else has to write the Chinese part, I save the English translation and the English version of the letter I write in a handbound book so we have a record of our correspondence. Usually we send a small photo album with pictures of our daughter and have our daughter, who is now 5 write a sentence or two and draw a picture. I cherish each of the letters we receive as well as those we send because I know their family will open our letters with as much excitement as we open theirs.

Whether or not you participate in this letter-writing challenge, I hope you will take a moment and write someone a letter this week–not just so they can receive it but also because it feels so good to send it.

from ages ago at Poppalina possibly the most adorable baby jacket of all time

I was dead broke at the time, as single mothers are wont to be, so made the whole thing out of a bag of stranded cottons I found in my yarn basket. There really is a lot to be said for using what you have, it forces you to improvise, with varying results, I admit, but it’s always interesting, you never know what’s going to happen.

As you can see, what happened here was a colour scheme that wouldn’t be embarrassed to front up at a Bollywood Shaadi. She made quite a splash in it. I always did so loathe the limited pastel colours available then for baby yarns, they used to make me so annoyed. It’s better now, but not much.

This project led me into others in which the whole point of interest was juxtaposed colour. Each colour has to work with the one before it and the one after, and beyond that, it’s completely random. I worked this idea for ages. I still do actually.

Get ready for some laughs with this post at Knit and tonic.

Kiss me; shake me. Maybe I’m going to fry in some sort of nasty place when I’m gone, but I’m going to admit it: Knitting isn’t funny and it will never be funny, I want it to be funny but there’s nothing–no way funny about it. … Knitting, like religion or a good Spa Day, isn’t funny. It isn’t funny like a pap smear isn’t funny. Heck, a mammogram can be funny, but a pap can’t be funny.

If the marchers in the New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade weren’t wearing fire department uniforms, high school band uniforms, or full pipe and drum regalia, they were wearing Aran sweaters . And they were beautiful – plain and fancy patterns, man, woman and child, marching up 5th Avenue on a windy but mercifully sunny Saturday.

The oft-told story of the Aran sweater is that they’ve been around for centuries and served to identify Irish fishermen should their lifeless bodies wash up on shore. This gave rise to the claim that Aran patterns were tied to families as are Scottish tartans; there are websites today that will sell you the Aran pattern for “your clan”.

It is now widely believed that Aran sweaters as we know them were started as a cottage industry in the late 19th or early 20th century in the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland as income for the isolated residents. Sweaters were traditionally knit with undyed cream wool called bainin (pronounced bawneen), which has high lanolin content and was thickly spun by hand. There’s no denying that the sweaters are cozy gear for outdoorsy types, and colorful history or no, the cables and stitches used in the construction of the garments are full of symbolism . No plans to visit Ireland to buy the real thing? Knit yourself an Aran:

There are plenty of books on the subject, or design your own using Barbara Walker’s Treasuries and a basic cardigan or pullover pattern. Elizabeth Dimbleby has photos and instructions for some common Aran stitches, including this fabulously complex “wide multi-cable”

Images of unfinished Aran sweaters are care of fluffbuff blog a great blog by an Italian in LA