The Muslim holy month of Ramadan is underway worldwide, being celebrated by over 1.2 billion Muslims. And Khadija O’Connell, a Bay Area, CA artist and blogger, has created a lovely, crafty program to help children to celebrate.

In most Muslim households, Ramadan is celebrated through fasting each day, from sunrise to sunset.

“It gives us an opportunity to feel the discomfort of an empty stomach as the poor always do. It’s also a time for contemplation and self reflection, which can help us to realign our life with our values,” says Khadija, “(It’s) a time of charity; through all these things the hope and aim is to draw nearer to God. ”

Muslim children are not required to fast, although many of them like to try. And so, as a means of giving her children a way to participate in Ramadan and mark the passage of the month, Khadija began making Ramadan Calendars.

Her early calendars were made from watercolor paper, which her children would paint. Then, in 1999, Khadija created one from fabric. It had a small pocket for each day of Ramadan, much like the German advent calendar. The children could mark each day that they fasted (or tried to) on the calendar with a small star, and search the pocket for a little treat.

Family friends loved the fabric calendar, and so Khadija has made them each year since, finally outsourcing them to a cooperative of Muslim women in China last year.

Some years later, Khadija became interested in the Ramadan Challenge Project, which was organized in the San Francisco Bay Area by the Northstar School. Through the Ramadan Challenge, children and families aimed not only to avoid television and video games for the month, but also for children to form a Ramadan resolution of their own.

“The resolution is a personal commitment from the child to consistently do good actions throughout the month. Children should be the primary decision-makers in choosing a Ramadan resolution,” says Khadija. “It could be any form of goodness such as helping your parents more, making your prayers, or some other type of regular community service. The point is that the commitment be something you consciously choose as well as carry out.”

Khadija approached the Northstar School to ask about creating a separate program based on their Ramadan Challenge, and was excited when they invited her to run their program, and expand it to a global level. “That’s when it became crafty!” she says. Khadija then created a Ramadan Challenge packet for children, and offered the program through her website, Ramadan Joy. Parents can sign their children up for the Challenge, and Khadija will mail them a packet. She has sent packets to children as far away as Canada and the UK.

The Ramadan Challenge packet contains a printed paper Ramadan Calendar with star stickers, four Ramadan craft kits, a Ramadan journal for keeping notes about the experience, and a Sadaqah Box for collecting charitable donations.

The craft kits are reminiscent of Ramadan symbols — children can make translucent stars from waxed tissue, or crescent moons from felt. These are simple projects that parents and children can do together, and make holiday decorations for the home.

“Part of Ramadan … for me has always been about making our home a warm and embracing place,” says Khadija. “I try to do this with candles, string lights, flowers and a few decorations, and at the end of the month with batches of homemade cookies.”

In addition to helping children celebrate Ramadan in a meaningful way, Khadija also says of the Ramadan Challenge: “I hope to inspire creativity. It sounds so simplistic but at the core of what I want to do is create beauty and do good.”

(Top photo copyright Khadija O’Connell)

Get a Hobby!: 101 All-Consuming Diversions for Any Lifestyle

is a reference manual for those of us who love to geek out on things. Written by Tina Barseghian (a contributing editor for Ready Made Magazine), it provides a nice introduction into hobbies both crafty and non — and incidentally, 45 different hobbies are represented in this cover photo.

Each and every one of the 101 hobbies profiled in this book is offered up with a brief history and overview of how it’s done, a list of supplies you’ll need to get started, some book and website references, profiles of hobbyists, and even the occasional project to try.

There are plenty of craft-oriented hobbies to check out — both the expected (knitting, sewing) and the unusual (candle making, stained glass, and gourd crafting). But the book goes way beyond crafts, to include such wildly divergent pastimes as dumpster diving, model aircraft, beachcombing, puppetry, species protection, astrological charting, and yes, taxidermy.

If you’re unsure of which hobbies are best for you to try, no worries — just take the book’s handy quiz to determine your “hobby personality.” From there, you can match yourself up with hobbies that fit you best.

Here’s an interview I did with Tina about this project:

What made you decide to write a reference manual about hobbies?
Actually, I was commissioned to write the book by the good folks at Quirk Packaging, who put together fun titles like “Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook” and “How to Be President.” They found me through Ready Made Magazine, where I’ve been contributing editor for the past five years.

So, you’ve profiled 101 different hobbies here. How in the world did you select them all?
I sat down with a group of friends, some pizza and beers, and we brainstormed for the entire night. We went through every hobby we’d ever heard of and compiled a list of almost 200 hobbies. Some of them I’d never heard of, like gravestone rubbing. My husband knew about it because he lived in England for a year and had seen people do it there. Some of them were ridiculous, like gambling (you can’t really promote that in good conscience!). But the whole process was really fun, as you could imagine.

. . . And were there any hobbies that you considered, which didn’t make it into the book? Has anyone gotten on your case for leaving out their favorite hobby?
Here are some that didn’t make it: Joining a jug band, open mike nights, Sunday driving, sausage making, juggling, stone wall stacking, karaoking, shoemaking, yodling.

We haven’t heard yet from the public about this because it just recently went on sale. But I’ll keep you apprised of any rants or raves. Actually, one guy apparently did respond to an article about the book that came out in Diablo Magazine . He called the writer of the article and insisted they do a story about him because he’s spent the last 20 years building one dollhouse! You gotta love these avid hobbyists!

It seems like this book would have required an exhaustive amount of research. . . .
Don’t get me started! It was an exhaustive undertaking, to stay the least. For most of 8 months, I was holed up in my office from morning till about 11 p.m., and through most weekends. (That’s why I dedicate the book to my husband, who truly stepped up and took care of our daughter and everything else.) I hired an assistant to do some cursory research (thank you, Katherine and Wiki!), but I had to confirm every piece of information from an outside source, which took some effort. Looking back, now that I have some distance, I realize it was a huge project, but I’m glad I didn’t think about the scope before I dove in, or I might have become intimidated. I thank Al Gore, or whoever is really responsible, for inventing the Internet.

So why hobbies? Why are they important? What do we gain from being hobbyists?
That’s a good question. If you notice on the cover of the book, it says “This book can save your life.” Now that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the idea there is that engaging in a hobby allows you to unplug from a demanding world (job, household chores, friend and family responsibilities, etc.) and focus on something that gives you pure, unadulterated joy, which in turn relaxes you and melts away the stresses of the day. It’s something you look forward to doing, rather than something you have to cross off your long to-do list.

Maybe for you it’s chiseling an ice sculpture or constructing the pages of your own book or ambling through the woods looking for mushrooms to cook in your spaghetti sauce. Whatever brings you that elusive feeling of contentedness is what will make you a better human being, and that’s why it’s important.

Of course I want to know what your hobbies are! And did you pick up any new hobbies as you researched this book?
I dabble in a few hobbies, but can’t say I’m a purist in any one hobby. I love to go to flea markets and second-hand shops looking for treasures. I love watering my garden and watching little plants thrive into healthy ones. I still love taking photos with my film camera, an old 1980s Canon AE1. I’ve got a digital that I can’t figure out quite how to use to get beautiful, arty photos, but my Canon never fails me. I also love using my Lomo Kompakt Automat Camera, which has a glass lens and was built in an optical factory in Russia. It’s just a point-and-shoot, but the resulting photos are truly ethereal.

As for picking up any hobbies, after completing research and writing each entry, I resolved to try that particular hobby, one after another. But to be honest, the only one I’ve really started doing is paint-by-numbers, so far. My abilities as a painter never progressed past the third grade, but I still love coloring with my daughter, so paint-by-numbers is the perfect intersection of that meditative feeling of coloring, but with a lot of guidance, which I definitely need.

[note from editor ... when I did the hobby quiz, I found my perfect hobbies were already the ones I loved to do, and the quiz also explained why I never quite got into beading and other crafts which I always thought looked fun but I never quite 'got' (no patience!). Also this book introduced me to hobbies I had previously never heard of - 'fantasy sports' - who knew! cheers Ed]

Plastic canvas is a lightweight, rigid version of needlepoint canvas. And it’s likely that you just shuddered a little, reading that last sentence, as you envisioned a grannylike tissue-box cover.

But bear with me for a minute! Plastic canvas has hidden superpowers, and it deserves some creative exploration by modern crafty minds.

The first thing I want to show you is this: not all plastic canvas is created equal. It’s made in three sizes: 7-count, 10-count, and 14-count. The count refers to the number of squares in an inch. And as you can see, this makes a huge difference in the appearance of the finished product. The larger squares can be stitched with worsted weight yarn or crewel wool, and result in a fuzzier, more homespun appearance.

10-count or 14-count canvas, on the other hand, can even be stitched with perle cotton embroidery floss, and yields a much finer-looking result.

You can use plastic canvas to construct just about any 3D shape, and that makes it useful for so much more than hiding tissue boxes. (There’s a great tutorial for cutting out plastic canvas shapes here.)

To get your creative juices flowing, for example, consider business card holders . . . and iPod cases . . . and glasses cases. One of the great things about using plastic canvas to make cases for your valuables is: the canvas, covered with yarn stitching, creates a nice shield that absorbs impact. I’ve had my iPod sheathed in a plastic canvas sleeve for two years, and it still looks brand-new.

You may have seen plastic canvas employed to make gift or jewelry boxes as well. And while the stuff does make great boxes, I’m more excited about its potential for making organizers of all kinds. You can construct boxes to hold your spools of yarn, or a multi-chambered pencil holder to organize your pens and paintbrushes. You can build your own set of stackable in-boxes. You can even construct a cube-shaped unit with a pull-out drawer, a la IKEA, to hold your ribbons and trims.

The greatest part of all these fabrications is, of course, that they’ll be covered with stitching. Now, many of us envision needlepoint as those tiny, slanted stitches. This is known as the Continental Stitch, and it’s only the tip of the needlepoint iceberg. There are dozens of interesting needlepoint stitches to try — and many of them work up much faster then Continental. In fact, you can explore more of these here and here.

…Not to mention, you can cover any plastic canvas surface with Continental stitch, and then embroider a design on the top of that. You can also applique fabric to plastic canvas. And you can stitch with your craziest novelty yarns to create outlandish textures. There’s way more to your needlepoint life than Continental Stitch.

I think there’s also jewelry potential in plastic canvas. A nice square, covered in interesting stitching, backed with felt, would make a great pendant or pin. Join a bunch of them together into a bracelet. (Incidentally, a sheet of plastic canvas makes a dandy earring-organizer.)

Plastic canvas is also a natural for book and journal covers. You can make a snazzy cover for your drugstore spiral notebook in no time, or you can construct one for your day-planner.

And then there’s toy-making! Imagine constructing a finger-puppet theater. Or a rocket-ship. Or a train. Or a nice, fenced corral for toy horses. Plastic canvas is so kid-friendly — the stitching is done with big, blunt needles — so you can easily involve kids in the stitching and assembly.

Seriously! Go get some plastic canvas, and explore the possibilities. Nobody will laugh at you, I promise.

Sister Diane can be found at her podcast craftypod, she is joining the whipup team as an occasional contributer. Welcome Diane.

As much as I love my online crafting community, there are times when I really want to make stuff in the company of real, live crafters. Crafting, as we all know, is an amazing way to connect with people — through making, we can find common ground with just about anyone.

I’d love to see more crafters forming local groups. It’s one thing to invite your pals over for a crafternoon, but to create a regular opportunity for creative people in your community to meet each other and share their love of craft . . . now that’s satisfying.

Here are some tips for crafters who are looking to group up:

Set a specific time and date, and stick to it. I’ve seen more new craft-groups die before they ever got off the ground, because nobody involved can agree on when to meet. It’s far better to establish a specific, recurring time right up front, such as “second Friday of the month from 3pm – 7pm.” The people who are truly interested in coming will make time on their busy calendars. And the people who have to miss the meeting can always come another time. Which leads to . . . .

Be a reliable presence in your community. In other words, when you say your group is going to meet at a particular time and place, be sure that it does. People who are considering coming to your group are very often thinking, “That looks like fun. I’ll just wait and see if they really stick around before I go try it out.” So if you want to keep attracting new members, you have to demonstrate that your group is stable and reliable . . . for months on end. I’ve had people come to my Church of Craft meetings who were on the mailing list for two years before they ventured out to visit us.

Make it clear exactly what happens at your meetings. It’s pretty universal: most of us feel shy about going to a party where we don’t know what to expect. So when you’re organizing a craft group, it’s important to help new people feel comfortable about coming to your meetings. When people know what to expect at your meetings, they’ll be a lot more likely to attend. And so, whenever you tell anyone about your meetings, be as specific as possible about the activities that will take place.

For example, let’s say you’re thinking of going to a craft group meeting, and you don’t know anyone there. Which of these meetings sounds more comfortable to you?

“We’re going to just hang and craft.”

-or-

“Everyone will bring a project they’re working on, and usually, we have knitters, embroiderers, beaders, and weavers in the group. We’ll work on our projects together, and then have a little show-and-tell. Then later, we’ll have coffee and dessert.”

These things take time. When you form a new craft group, and everyone is fairly new to each other, it takes a few meetings for the initial awkwardness to dissolve, and friendships to form. So be prepared to hang in there for those first few meetings, even if they aren’t quite the warm, convivial experience you’d envisioned. That experience will come — just keep meeting. Which also leads to . . .

Be a good host. If you’re the group organizer, then it’s important that you make everyone who comes to your meetings feel welcome. That means greeting each person as they arrive. It means introducing people to each other, to help get conversations flowing. And it means thanking each person for coming, and saying goodbye to them as they leave. In other words, the more comfortable and appreciated people feel in your group, the more likely they’ll be to come back. However . . .

Be patient with the flake-factor. Every single time your craft group meets, at least one person who said they would come, won’t show up. Sometimes, almost everyone will no-show. Don’t sweat it. Just keep having meetings, and before long, you’ll build a loyal following. Everyone is busy, and everyone flakes out on something once in a while. It’s nothing personal.

All this is much easier to do than you might think, and the rewards of forming a craft group are huge — making good friends, learning new techniques, and enjoying that amazing crafty group-energy. Get out there and group up, everyone!