In Awe

These teeny, tiny mittens were actually hand-knit using sewing thread and UK No. 22 (0.70mm needles). I'm throughly impressed with the small-scale ingenuity of this woman. You can view more miniatures made by this knitter at her flickr account: knit_purr

Vintage-Style Skull Stockings

The greatest thing about these Skull Stockings from Vintage Stitch-O-Rama! is that they couple my love for vintage and my obsession for pirates. They're knit using the "Elizabethan stocking formula" so you can easily achieve a custom fit.

Also, be forewarned: Ye who ventures into the hazy waters of Vintage Stitch-O-Rama! may ne'er return.

Snakes on a Tie

Hand-screened Snakes on a Tie. Pretty awesome.

Street Fashion

Today, I present you with links that chronicle street fashion. It's like people-watching, but from the comforting glow of your computer monitor.

The Sartorialist: Everyday New York street fashion with well-thought critiques from the author and what works and doesn't work about each person's outfit.

Hel-Looks: My uttmost favorite site that I have spent hours and hours browsing. The photos are of energetic people in Helsinki, Finland.

London Street Fashion: The "interactive" interface annoyed me, but it's packed full of pictures for each "neighborhood" in London once you figure out how to navigate through the site.

STHLMstil.se: Street fashion direct from Stockholm, Sweden. Use the red arrow on the bottom-left of the screen to navigate to more pictures.

Stillinberlin: Fashion of ordinary people in Berlin.

The Clothes Project: Homey Singaporean fashion with a focus on the people beneath the clothes.

Face Hunter: Those crazy, crazy Parisians.

Meet CutE: Focuses on hipsters in Shanghai.

Tokyo Street Fashion: Tokyo fashion divided up by the more noted neighborhoods.

And now, a fashion-related quote from The Manflesh: "You know what I really like? Shorts with hard zippers!" He pauses to demonstrate the loud sound of the purported hard zipper. "Yeah! Isn't that manly!"

Fug Friday: Vintage Granny

The thing that amuses me the most is that they considered it "granny" even in the 70s.

I'm also perplexed by the bottom right corner. What the hell is going on there? Why isn't it uniform with the rest of the quilt?

Craft + Etsy Contest

The five winners of the Craft + Etsy contest have been anounced!

When I first saw it, I knew the interactive pendant by KathrynRiechert (first picture in this post) would win. I didn't follow the entries close enough to predict all of the others. However, I'm really surprised that this entry didn't make the list at all—not even the Etsy front page features the day of the announcements. I thought for sure it would be selected when I first saw it. Maybe I'm a freak, but I thought it was really clever.

If interested, you can view all the unsold entries for the time being.

For Your Hands

About two and a half years ago (winter time), I wanted to knit myself a pair of arm warmers/fingerless gloves. When I searched for patterns to get some ideas, the Mikado Ribbon Fingerless Gloves pattern was the only decent pattern I could find—even amongst patterns for sale in the local yarn store. Just last year, I noticed a huge influx of freebie patterns for arm warmers/fingerless gloves becoming available on the interwebs. I anticipate that number to continue to skyrocket, as even the summer issue of Knitty has one pattern for fingerless gloves and another for "fingerless mitts" (or, those half-fingered gloves from the 80s).

In the meantime, here are my favorite free fingerless gloves/mitts/arm warmer patterns:

Caution: It's Warm

The woman who designed this caution scarf has been subject to some rather scathing critiques of some of her other designs. But this scarf is awesome and makes up for any other fashion faux pas she may have committed in the past.

Spotlight: StaceyRebecca

StaceyRebecca is an awesome and fun seller from Etsy. She makes finger puppets! But not just finger puppets—fun and exciting finger puppets. And not just fun and exciting finger puppets, but finger puppets with a story and personality. You're buying so much more than a piece of felt when you buy one of StaceyRebbeca's puppets—you're buying a little softie of fun to keep beside you when working in a drab and dull office. I really do think she should up her prices closer to $10, the descriptions alone make her puppets worth that.

Selling Your Wares On Flickr

A lot of people—on Etsy and elsewhere—use Flickr to promote their handcrafted wares or other services. When you think about it, it's a great idea: Using a community-based photo sharing site to show pictures of your items and entice buyers to purchase them. Flickr's "photo pools" make this even easier in that you can create groups of people and share photos based on themes; "for sale", crafts, knitting, "I made it myself", and so on. However, Flickr clearly states the following in their community guidlines:

Flickr is for personal use only. If you sell products, services or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account.

True to their word, they've been deleting personal accounts right and left. You can read about it in the Etsy forums, among many other craft venues. The ensuing witch hunts have also been noted over at Whipup, who sent an email requesting more clarification from the Flickr team. Flickr's response was posted in this blog post.

So far, photographers selling their services have been neglected in the witch hunts. While I can see why a photo sharing website would be reluctant to go after professional photographers, I've noticed many unscathed photographers on the site who are directly violating the user guidelines as much as any craftisan who advertises their wares via photos on Flickr. At this point in time, I feel like Flickr is unfairly playing favorites. If I hear otherwise in the future, I will certainly make a note of it on this blog.

Sources:

Further Reading:

Fug Friday: Fun Fur Fugs

Fun fur has one purpose in life: to be used for stuffed animals. Fun fur. Animals have fur. Get it? If you must insist on using it for anything other than stuffed animals, please use it sparingly. Otherwise, I will be forced to send my ninja assassin squad after you. Now, on to the specimens:

Flip flops, complete with a matching scrunchie.

While fun fur is evil, so are ponchos. So how does one define the act of combining the two and then stuffing your kid in them?

Play With Your Food

Of late, miniature food art made from Sculpey seems to be cropping up all over the place. A recent search for tutorials brought me to the amazing work of Pine Studio. The site hosts a number of pictorial how-tos that are not in English, but the gallery is where I spend most of my time. Whoever this person is, they're one of the more detailed and amazing miniature food artists I've seen.

The following picture is from verpabunny at Flickr. They have posted a few other examples of food art that are almost as inspiring as those at Pine Studio.

If you're more interested in purchasing miniature food, there's some amazing sellers who make food jewelry and such over at Etsy. Aoi's Art is one of the more notable Etsy food artists, but I absolutely adore Tatsuko's sushi platter necklaces, earrings, and wall art.

Knitted Katamari Damacy Hat

I randomly found this hat on Flickr when I was looking for this upcoming Friday's dose of fug. The picture was most striking, especially against the actual specimens of fug that my search had turned up, so I thought I'd share it here.

The creator posted very lengthy notes on her process at her blog. If you'd like to replicate it, I suggest you be at least an intermediate level knitter, or have a lot of time and patience. Her notes are by no means a clear and easy-to-follow pattern.

Fug Friday: Cookiessssessss

In memorium of the glorius You Knit What??—whose unfortunate passing has given rise to Fug Fridays—I present you with this fine piece of craftsmanship linked from the comments of their farewell post:

The "Super~FUZZY~MOHAIR & ANGORA~sweater~PANTS with FEET" was up for auction on Ebay by UK seller, the-mohairknitter. What concerns me the most is that 1.) someone bought it, and 2.) said someone is presumably going to wear it.

Oh, and it has a matching sweater!

Introducing...

Fug Fridays!

I just found out that one of my favorite sites, You Knit What?? has passed on to the depths of website death. It's a very sad thing, indeed. And even though a You Knit What - Part Two has popped up while the original was still in it's last death throes, it's just not the same.

So to honor my many months of joy from this wonderful website, I hereby chirsten Fug Fridays (not to be limited to knitting). Look forward to every Friday, when I will post a picture (and maybe even tutorials, if we're lucky) of a craft atrocity that should never be.

Here's a little appetizer to get the party started—a pattern from Bernat titled "cool camouflage pants", or what I like to call "the quickest way to the worst Jr. High experience EVAR":