Results tagged “diy”

     

UmberDove’s Etsy store is awash with color: hand-sewn pillowcases, pouches, clutches, and table runners each patch-worked together in a blend of fabric and shape. The artist, Seattleite Kelly Clark, sews and posts new items on a regular basis…and they sell just as quickly. Her whimsical thematic pieces are a mish-mash of fabric scraps, often punctuated with floaty wool feathers or free-hand machine embroidered springs of plant life. These elements of the natural world also strongly influence Kelly’s more focused work: paintings, poetry, and sculpture. But let’s learn a little bit more about her sewing, shall we?

Handmade Nation - a documentary about the flourishing do-it-yourself art, craft and design community - has been a labor of love for first-time filmmaker and director Faythe Levine. The idea for the film was conceived in 2003 during Levine’s trip to Chicago's Renegade Craft Fair and production began in 2006 when Levine and her director of photography, Micaela O’Herlihy, spent a year and a half traveling around the country, interviewing over eighty independent DIY-ers. We first heard about the project last year when Levine and her team were screening clips of the film while trying to raise money to offset the remaining production costs.

The nights on the farm were restless, especially in such a tiny tent, but we wouldn’t have slept any better indoors. We’re never at ease sleeping away from home. Nevertheless, waking at five in the morning was effortless. Maybe it was the anticipation of all the new experiences that each day brought or maybe it was because we hadn’t been stuck breaking down our station so late the night before. As we walked from our tent to the school, we said good morning to the ducks for the last time. In a half an hour we would return with the rest of the class to butcher several of them.

If you’re one of those people who can’t even sew on a button, then you might be dubious about the extent to which such a skill could translate into a lucrative business. Well, it most certainly can and, based on the high number of giddy participants at Urban Craft Uprising this weekend, it often does.

KEXP FAVORITES LIVE & FREE!: Kick off the weekend tonight by heading to KEXP's Concerts at the Mural, the first of the free all-ages concert series put on at the Seattle Center. Tonight's tunes will feature a few of KEXP's favorite bands: Blitzen Trapper and Throw Me The Statue. The show is tailored to the culturally curious, seeking out best of the area’s independent music scene. Most importantly, the beer garden opens at 5 p.m. with the show shortly after. 6:00-8:00 p.m., Fri. // Seattle Center Mural Amphitheatre, 305 Harrison St // Free (not including beer)

Seattle-area tech geeks will already be familiar with the DIY quarterly Make magazine. You know it's full of ways to void warranties, reuse old gear, and manufacture new things that the Powers That Be haven't seen fit to provide to the marketplace. The fact that the guns are likely to be of the soldering rather than the glue variety is not the only thing that separates it from something like Ready Made; there's an underlying hacker ideology that welcomes you to take control of your technology and bend it to your own will. Is it our Whole Earth? Maybe not yet, but that's the path it seems to be on. (Ahem, this hyperbole is heartfelt, but we do have a few bylines in early editions of the magazine.)

Tipster Matt sent us to this politically oriented, print-your-own Halloween mask site. There's a whole collection you can download, including your choice of John McCain, Cindy McCain, Sarah Palin, RNC Chair Mike Duncan, Sean Hannity, Henry Kissinger, Joe Lieberman, Greta Van Susteren, Laura Bush and Charles Krauthammer. A late entry, provided separately, is McCain strategist Steve Schmidt, a veteran Karl Rove operative. We warn you, though: These things are scary, and probably not good for children.

Kim is relieved the debate is actually going to happen. She'll be watching with friends tonight before working all weekend. Saturday, she'll take a break for a quiet night out, and then she'll close the weekend off getting funky in the balcony of Jazz Alley with Maceo.

We hear the insults. Bloggers are no-names. We are malcontents. We live in our parents' basements, practicing onanism like Tiger Woods practices putting. Well we have news for you, blogger-haters. Laugh no more, because a man who has the earned respect of many for his political activism and musical genius is joining our growing club. Krist Novoselic has started a blog. This hero of the 1990s, a man who had the courage to throw his...

Monday the 10th, at 7pm, the Paramount Theatre presents Charlie Chaplin's 51st, 52nd, and 53rd films, all from 1916: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, and The Vagabond. They're all half-hour or so shorts from early on in his Mutual Films era, and feature Chaplin's genius for environmental comedy, with mishaps with escalators and fire poles.

Rachel Hynes is a former barista and yet still enjoys spending time in espresso places. She will review them. This is her third such review.

Ex-Seattleite, ex-Stranger-nic and ex-grassroots campaign manager Phil Campbell wrote a book that we loved about Grant Cogswell's run for City Council in the wake of WTO. The book is Zioncheck for President, which we've discussed with Phil in the past. Now Stephen Gyllenhaal has bought the rights to the film adaptation and plans to produce the thing DIY style here in Seattle.

FESTIVAL: The first-ever (official) Lebowski fest in Seattle kicks things off at the Showbox. Tonight's the chubby dance-rock of the oft tighty-whitey-clad Har Mar Superstar and a screening of the Coen Brothers' classic. Tomorrow's bowling with The Dude at Kenmore Lanes. Wear your best bathrobe and pound some white Russians, or you'll be out of your element, Donny.

Tuesday, December 12

The PI's John Cook offered the best short summary of what's new at Zillow in his Venture Blog today:

Big changes at Zillow.com today, with the company overhauling its Web site to include user-generated for sale listings, a real estate wiki and a new service called "Make Me Move" that allows any home owner to set a dream price for their home on the site.

Carlos Rodela doesn't hold much stock with the Seattle music scene, either its cloistered, big-fish-in-a-small-pond pretensions or with its rock star showmanship.

Not to spoil it for you, but at The Stranger's HUMP! amateur porn film festival, the entry "Getting a Leg Up in Porn" featured a cumshot delivered via the game Mousetrap. It's hilarious, and of course we are allowed to spoil it for you because the films are shown four or eight or a dozen times over the weekend and then destroyed. If you haven't seen it, you'll never see it. Anyway, the Mousetrap cumshot was part of the film's "aren't facials ridiculous" theme and that was one take on it. Other films had different ideas. Some of them we agreed with wholeheartedly, and some of them we weren't so fond of, but the experience of seeing all of those sexual opinions displayed so (ahem) nakedly while in the company of a hundred other couples, friends, neighbors, people...It was almost enough to make us think we aren't the only ones having sex in this city. Or watching porn. Or enjoying porn. For one night we're pretty sure we weren't.

-There's a great article on the rise of some aquatic species and the decline of others today that you might have missed because it's in the Puget Sound Business Journal.

DIY isn't just for musicians and craftistas anymore. If the words "artisan cheese" kick your salivary glands into overdrive and and spur your desire to be that artisan, call the Mt. Townsend Creamery in Port Townsend and make plans for an August weekend workshop:

Vermont farmstead cheesemaking pioneer and renowned teacher Peter Dixon will be returning to Western Washington Aug 4-6 to teach two cheesemaking courses at the Mt. Townsend Creamery in Port Townsend.

Continue reading "Who Made Your Cheese?"

The Austin-based Craft Mafia has been a hit in Texas and in other cities and Seattle just the kind of place for a new familia. And as if in answer to that void SeattleCraftMafia.com launched today.

Maybe we failed to give credit where credit was due yesterday in the Bumpershoots post. Some of the best stuff at the festival tends to not be music (notably the 826 thing from last year) and they have a lot of cool sounding events listed on their website that aren't music, but definitely are worthy of a mention.

In honor of President's Day, we've included our fave prezzes along with our weekend activity list.

-When you hear that an experimental plane has crashed you expect to hear that some kind of ninja plane from Boeing Field ditched into the ocean. This time it's a DIY job, though. We're guessing the flight itinerary didn't read "Garage, Chehalis Airport, trees, Harborview ICU," but that's unfortunately what happened.

Seattlest has another podcasting event we want you to attend. We really want to hear you out there, apparently, so if you produce or know of a podcast that's Seattle-related in content or dialect you should post it in the comments or email Seattlest. Our all-seeing eye is currently sweeping the internets for some new additions to our links section and we want to make you famous.

Seattlest's bus ride to work lasts about twelve minutes. That's just long enough for us to find a seat, sit in it, open our bag, take out our laptop and boot it up, Start, Shutdown, Yes we would like the computer to shut down, put it away and get off the bus. Ah, another productive commute! You didn't notice it, but during the minute our computer was on it attempted and failed to find any available wireless networks. Our email rants to the editor were unable to fly out into the either.

If, like Seattlest, you spend your morning commute catching up on world events through Morning Edition, you’ve probably heard excerpts from the StoryCorps project. Your fellow Americans have been busy interviewing each other, and NPR is airing a few of the results.

The DIY armour that that guy killed at the federal courthouse yesterday attempted to use didn't prevent him from becoming "that guy killed at the federal courthouse yesterday." Future desperados may want to take note: a cutting board in a Jansport on your chest will not be enough to protect you if you are planning on furtively waving a WWII grenade at a court building.

Seattlest has long been vexed by the disappearance of hardware because we own a toolbelt and we need to keep a certain supply of nails in the pouch or it won’t jingle satisfactorily as we walk about, assessing DIY projects around the home.