Rather than fretting over what holiday gifts to buy family and friends EVERY year – why not simplify your life?
Personal family calendars are an easy, thoughtful gift that let you share your own ‘year in review‘ though your very best pictures.
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Beachcombing, a few years back, my friend found a piece of driftwood that looked exactly like three horses’ heads rising from the waves. Very cool. But that’s nothing compared to the driftwood horses of artists Matt Torrens, Heather Jansch, and Deborah Butterfield.
The differences between these different artists’ interpretations of “driftwood horse” are striking, but all have achieved a remarkable combination of driftwood’s naturally weathered graceful lines with the powerful majesty of the equine form.
Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta (“Cow Town”) and now living in southern California, the horse rendered in driftwood is a natural subject for sculptor Matt Torrens.
“Spirit,” the driftwood horse head sculpture by Matt Torrens shown here, was exhibited at the California State Fair in Sacramento, August/September 2008. Photograph by laura.bell.
It just doesn't get any more Steampunk than this! Benches, armchairs, tables, beds, wood-burning stoves like something pulled from a Jules Verne story -- even a baby carriage! The mine…
So, you want your kid to have a bedroom that's decorated to match his dreams -- but you don't want to spend much money? Well, here's one incredibly frugal solution to that decorating dilemma: Block Posters lets you send any image from your computer (up to 1 MB size file), slice it up, print it out, and turn it into a giant wall poster -- free!
Who knew that watermelon carving was such a hot art form?
Around here we tend to think in terms of pumpkin carving – especially at this time of year, with harvest winding up and Halloween just looming on the horizon.
Well, heck, why not watermelon carving too?
Of course, we’re entranced by the whole carved-radish culture of Mexico’s Night of the Radishes, naturally… and other weird and wonderful fruit and vegetable art makes an appearance from time to time, so the watermelon as a medium for artistic expression is not a big leap…
“Want me to knit you a bacon scarf?” Diane asked, and unwittingly launched my search for arts and crafts with a bacon theme. She said she could probably “fake up” a pattern. Thinking back, I’m not entirely sure whether she planned to knit it from the actual fatty meat product. In which case, er, no…
But this Unsettlingly Real-Looking Felted Bacon Scarf in merino wool is both amusing and completely wearable — at least, in cool weather and possibly not around those of my vegan pals who tend to get queasy at the sight of meat.
By the way, if you just dropped in (hello there!) and you’re wondering what the heck all this pork-related nonsense is about, please do skip back to Virtual Collection: Bacon Bits – Part 1 for the explanation.
It’s as good an explanation as anyone’s likely to come up with… except maybe for Revison3’s Lil Internet Superstar:
But enough of that.
We’ve got loftier ambitions for our pork products!
(I’m pretty sure that Bacon in Art is an actual Library of Congress catalog heading. Okay, maybe not, but I do remember filing something under Pigs in Art back in my summer-job-in-library days. And yes, it was filed correctly.)
Bacon, when raw, lends itself to weaving and shaping. Cook it and it holds its shape. What better craft material?
Instructables.com teaches you how to make your own fashion-forward bacon placemats, the inspiration for NotMartha.org’s famous bacon baskets and breadless BLT.
Or you can deconstruct your bacon for a home science experiment by making bacon soap (bacon-shaped soap molds not included), though the 2-week wait — to cure the added lye so it won’t burn your skin — may discourage all but the keenest of patient crafters from trying it.
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At the very heart of grey downtown Toronto, there's a special bright sparkling place where Spanish colours riot and fairies cavort with doorstop-solid cats. Feeling a bit down and grey,…