CRAFTERNOON BLOG

Saturday’s Handmade Crafternoon at the NYPL was a huge success! It was a joy to meet Grace Bonney and help her celebrate the release of Design*Sponge at Home, her first (and truly inspiring) book, featuring the best of the best of design*sponge!I’ll do a proper recap asap, I promise.

This weekend I’m doing a demo at Maker Faire in NY on Sunday at 1pm! I’ll be demoing ideas for handmade party decor. It’s going to be a blast. Maker Faire is the COOLEST, I swear. If you didn’t go last year, you missed out. Hope to see you this weekend!

Boy do I love San Francisco. I’m not the first one who left another little piece of my heart there, and there’s no way I’m the last.

The first Crafternoon at the San Francisco Public Library was a tremendous success. On Saturday, August 27th at Presidio Branch I kicked off the Crafternoon series, West Coast library style, showing folks how to create collages and decoupage.

An incredible amount of gorgeous craft supplies were generously donated by EK Success Brands. Here are just some of the lovely things they donated to the series, which will be used at all of the future events. EK Success set the library up so that the Crafternoon at the SFPL series is sure to achieve handmade greatness!

The space at the library is perfect for this series – bright, sunny and brand spanking new! And we had a fantastic turnout of family and friends, ready to craft and chat.

People dove right into the decoupaging, creating all kinds of beautiful pieces.

I was absolutely thrilled with every aspect of the event. It took a lot of coordinating and brainstorming, and all of the effort really paid off. I’d like to thank all of the good people at the San Francisco Public Library who made it happen: Christy Estrovitz, Rosie Merlin, and especially Megan Anderson, the Presidio Branch manager pictured below.

Megan brought a diverse selection of craft books to the event, and had a laptop with her so that any attendee with a library card could check books out directly from her. And for those folks who didn’t have a library card, she was able to sign them up on the spot!

The next SFPL Crafternoon event will take place in October. Please check the Presidio Branch site for details closer to the date.

As for me, I’m back in NYC, ready for this Saturday’s Handmade Crafternoon at the NYPL. We’ll be celebrating the release of Design*Sponge at Home, the first book by design*sponge, which is out today! Hope to get crafty with you soon.

I can’t believe it’s almost time for my first Crafternoon at the San Francisco Pulic Library! On Saturday, August 27th, from 2-4pm, the whole family is invited to come to our kickoff Crafternoon event at the library’s Presidio Branch. I will be leading the event, and will show crafters how to create collages and how to decoupage. We’ll cut and paste our way to some gorgeous crafty goods.

I’m so happy to say that this event is FREE, just like our Handmade Crafternoon events at the NYPL. Supplies are generously donated by EK Success Brands. If you would like to practice decoupage, please bring a box of any size to decorate.

There will also be a selection of inspiring craft books on hand from the library’s collection. I hope I’ll see you there!

Presidio Branch Library, Meeting Room (3150 Sacramento St., SF) | Saturday, August 27 | 2-4p | FREE

*This event is all ages, but children under 14 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

**If you have magazines lying around your house that you’d be happy to cut up and craft with, please bring them!

This is the start to my new morning commute.

This is what gets me to Manhattan.

These are some things that I see on my journey.

It is a joyful way to start the day – worthy of poetry:

Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.   

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you
          are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home,
          are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me,
          and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
-Walt Whitman, from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

On vacation in the glorious Bay of Fundy, yesterday we picked wild strawberries.

Picking these tiny berries is a meditative process – bent over at ground level, sometimes in a modified cat pose from yoga, you carefully dig through the tall grass to get the sweet jewels, most no bigger than a fingernail, some even smaller than that. But the tasty morsels are a great reward for your quiet persistence.

Our dog happily trotted around, free from his city-dog leash, as we searched for more treats. My husband pointed out that one should pinch the berries from their stems instead of pulling them – they are so delicate, the pulling motion winds up crushing them between your fingers.

My mother-in-law smartly suggests that you hull the berries as you go, so that once you get them home you can commence the eating instantly.

Picking berries in the sunshine makes me a very happy camper.

And ending the day eating wild strawberries with meringues and fresh whipped cream really can’t be beat.

On Sunday I roamed the Renegade Craft Fair, meeting cool crafters, buying their handmade wares, and getting loads of inspiration.

This year’s fair had a fun clutch of booths by the McCarren park softball fields where you could sit down and make things. Folks from BurdaStyle were teaching people how to use sewing machines.

Minwax wood had a station where you could stain a wooden picture frame.

And Renegade had a booth where you could learn how to make friendship bracelets.

There was a sweet little pamphlet you could take with you that had hand drawn instructions on how to make a friendship bracelet. I’m very excited to try to technique with something thicker than embroidery floss to make a belt.

The first folks I met were this lovely crew from Brooklyn and North Carolina, representing the shops Shelter, Lovelier Seas and Bow & Arrow.

Valerie, Ian, Carrie and Rob had one of my favorite booths in the whole fair. It had such a sweet old fashioned feel to it. And now that I tracked down the Shelter blog and this sweet post about their friendship, I love them even more! From the gorgeous bags that Shelter makes to the sweet kids clothes from Lovelier Seas to the smokin hot high-waisted denim shorts from Bow and arrow, these folks had something special. But there’s so much to see at the Renegade Craft Fair, I had to keep on keepin’ on.

There are loads of talented illustrators and designers represented at the fair. I love the cards I bought from www.Beauidealism.com, pictured above.

Check out the festive confetti filled eggs made by Laurin Garcia, pictured above, of Jokey Yokey. Her business is “inspired by the Latin American tradition of the Cascarone – a confetti filled eggshell cracked over one’s head to bring good luck and cheer.” Her products are colorful and 100% biodegradable, AND she donates the eggs whites and yolks to a local Baltimore homeless shelter. That’s what I call a good egg.

Next I visited with my friend Kimm Alfonso of Kimmchi. She was mobbed with lots of customers the whole time I was hanging around checking out her silkscreened tees.

I bought two sweet cards illustrated by Laura Fisk of Fisk and Fern. One of them I plan to save for my parents’ anniversary in November – I hope I’ll remember where I put it.

I adore the embroidered designs from Coral and Tusk. I wanted to buy everything they had on display.

One of the last booths that I visited had illustrations of veggies by Claudia Pearson. Her style is so great, and I dig the message to eat local and eat fresh.

So it was another wonderful Renegade Craft Fair. I’m always so inspired by what I see, and who I meet. I can’t wait ’til next June.

I posted a few months ago about that tree that grows in Brooklyn, the one that I adopted as part of the Trees NYC program. Well, I’m not the only one in my neighborhood beautifying the trees with flowers. Check out my Greenpoint mates who are giving our trees an added splash of color.

I love the white picket fence around the tiny tree. A mini version of suburban life!

These plants with the white edges look so fresh and so clean.

Look at all that green. That right there is one healthy looking tree!

But you don’t need a tree to get your gardening on – some renegade neighbor found a perfect patch of dirt around a fire hydrant.

That’s really making do with what you’ve got, and making what you’ve got look pretty, too.

But I’m most excited about my own tree. Who can blame me? I’m a proud tree momma.

My tree bed doesn’t look as lush as the others, but check out that fence! Sure, it’s not white and suburban, but do you know why it’s so darn inspiring? I’ll tell you why – it was built anonymously to protect my tree!

That’s correct – I did not build the fence, nor did my husband Rufus, my tree-care-sharer. But one day he walked home and saw that someone had made a fence to go around our tree! I have an idea who might have done the sweet and DIY deed.

When I was planting my second round of flowers, a guy in the neighborhood came over to say how pretty they looked and how nice it was that I was taking care of the tree. I swooned, because who can resist compliments like those? But then he said he was worried that the garbage was sometimes being put out right next to the flowers and crushing some of them. He said, “You need a fence.” And though I agreed, I wasn’t sure when I’d get around to it. But someone did it for me. And my flowers and my trees are squish-free.

So get out there in your world and do some good deeds for your neighbors or their trees. You’ll be building community in big ways with small steps of beauty. Sometimes fences DO make good neighbors.

May your day be filled with beauty.