Sunday, October 01, 2006

Crafty Bastards and more!

Happy First Day of October! Now can someone tell me exactly where September went????

Unlike Fiber Fest (Patti, your description made me smell wet wool), today was the perfect day for Crafy Bastards--75 and sunny.And it was packed! I'm glad I went early. There were about 100 vendors, about 10-15 of which were really high quality, though many ideas to be had all around. Oddly, there were two booths that were inspired by squid (one was really cute: cleodee.etsy.com). A lot of buttons (like campaign buttons, not clothing buttons), which I hadn't realized were quite so big. Very cool bags with funky construction by pistol (www.pistolstitched.com--love the name!). My big purchase was a bag:

It's all handsewn, fabric and leather. The flap tucks into the black horizontal strap. I'm not sure you can see, but the circly patterns are my color blue. I think this artist was on Daily Candy (www.miyasol.com). I also got a little shirt for Kayla from www.1girl1boy.com:

So I'll go again next year, knowing that there's lots of stuff to be sifted through.

I've made some jewellery the past couple weeks. Here's a necklace I made for my mom's birthday, of tiger's eye, alabaster & silver, with a 3d silver flower pendant.

This one is for my friend Deb's birthday (red tiger's eye, olive & bronze pearls, brown goldstone, silver & a pearl clasp). Let's just talk about how hard it is to scale things down for someone smaller!
I had worked on this one in Santa Fe but was never quite happy with it, so I redid it and made a bracelet to match.
Now here's the one that I want advice on. It's square pearls, silver beads, and jade-like rose things dangling from it. I'm not sure this is the right clasp for this idea, though. The clasp has garnets in it. Thoughts?
Now I'm going to go rip out what I did yesterday on the Challenge. I'm having trouble with the translation from head to product.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

holy cow -- stop the presses. Erica bought a BAG!! ;)

Just kidding of course. It is a very cool bag.

I'm glad to hear that crafty bastards was fun but there's still room for us. Were people buying a lot of stuff? Should we do it next year?

Anonymous said...

and as for the necklace, you're right... I don't think that's quite the right clasp. Do you think you could do a lariat type thing so that the jade flowers just went through a loop? That would be pretty cool!

Love the other ones too!

Anonymous said...

and as for the challenge -- my damn head hurts. I spent HOURS in AC Moore today -- just HOURS! And I'm not sure I'm much closer~!

Anonymous said...

I think people were buying stuff. I think the key would be to make really nice interesting stuff that is reasonably priced because I don't think people were going with the intention of spending a lot on one item.

I forgot to mention--there is apparently an Atlanta counterpart to Crafty Bastards, though I missed the name of it.

Anonymous said...

Rob pretty much told me the necklace wasn't right last night, in his ever-so round about way.

A lariat is a good idea, and that will be a challenge, though not the one I'm supposed to be working on. Who knew that 2 little sticks of wood could be so difficult????

Hmmm....maybe I'll burn them and use the ashes to draw something....

Anonymous said...

All of the necklaces are really beautiful. How about adding another strand to the last one/small beads with some garnet to tie in the clasp?

The bag is awsome!! I wish we had a cool show like that around here.

Anonymous said...

Way to think outside the box Erica..draw a picture of driftwood with burned driftwood.

Anonymous said...

I think it's more desparation than thinking outside the box...

Anonymous said...

Just remember, the winner of this challenge gets to pick the next challenge--