Woo-Hoo! You’re getting this show free for 30 days thanks to Swap-bot!

Swap-bot is a magical place where you can join hundreds of genuine snail-mail swaps, involving letters, postcards, art, crafts and so much more. Or, you can host your own swap!

Click over there and show them some love for sponsoring this show – and while you’re there, dip a toe into the joy of mail by joining a swap.

How many letters have you written in the past year? Not emails, and not greeting cards or thank-you notes, but honest-to-goodness handwritten letters? If the answer is “Now many”, that’s not surprising. With the advent of email and social media, we’re doing more speedy communicating with each other than ever, but the slow, thoughtful nature of letters is getting lost.

My guest for this show is Donovan Beeson, who co-founded the Letter Writer’s Alliance – a worldwide group with over 2,000 members and counting. Donovan and Kathy Zadrony offer pen pal connections, downloadable stationery, and both online and real-life camaraderie to letter-lovers everywhere.

Donovan also maintains the INtangible Blog, which is 100% hand-lettered and hand-drawn. It celebrates her love of vintage post-office goodies and interesting ephemera.

This show is actually about a great many things: it’s about why letter-writing is beneficial, but it’s also about what online communication does well. It’s about mail art, and how a well-decorated letter actually touches many more people than whoever it’s addressed to. Donovan and I also talk about letter-writing socials, mailable carrier pigeons, and perfection in blogs vs. the honesty of errors.

Here, I’ll mail you some links:

• Here’s Donovan’s hand-written blog, the INtangible Blog. Always a lovely read.

• Join the Letter Writer’s Alliance to connect with other letter-writers.

• 16 Sparrows is Donovan and Kathy’s stationery business, which gave rise to the Letter Writer’s Alliance and the Pigeon Post.

• If you want to spend some happy hours perusing postal history and beautiful old typewriters, look no further than Donovan’s Flickr stream.

• If you’re curious about postal art, check out Good Mail Day by Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Gilligan Wheeler.

• Here’s the Love Letters project Donovan mentioned in the interview.

• Don’t forget our lovely sponsor, Swap-bot! In fact, Swap-bot was the subject of a past episode of CraftyPod. Click here to listen!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

A Bob Ross landscape

Today would have been the 69th birthday of Bob Ross. And if you don’t know who Bob was, it’s high time you met him!

In the U.S., many of us grew up with The Joy of Painting on public television – a perfectly mesmerizing show in which a soft-spoken man with amazing hair would proceed to complete an entire nature painting in just under 25 minutes, telling us exactly how it did it along the way. If you’ve ever watched the show, you probably still get that autonomic relaxation response from the quiet tap, tap, tap of the bushes against the canvas.

A compliation of moments from The Joy of Painting, by RainbowBanana on Vimeo

Some people make fun of Bob, and lord knows I’ve made a “happy little tree” joke here and there myself. But the truth is, he just wanted people to try their hand at making some art. He developed a wet-in-wet painting method that allowed scores of folks who didn’t think they had any talent to create works they felt proud of. He wanted art to be fun and non-intimidating.

Bob said this line in just about every episode of his show: “We don’t make mistakes, we just have happy accidents.” So go out there today and have a few happy accidents of your own. And then if you will, pause a moment to thank Bob for his contribution to creativity.

Happy Birthday, Bob!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Surpriiiiiiise! A few routine (but very belated) blog updates led to a big ol’ crash yesterday, which in turn led to this new bloggy look. I’m not 1000% in love, but I actually have plans to move this whole thing to another platform in a few months, so this’ll do for now.

Anyway, I’m multitasking a little here. I’m testing whether my RSS feed is still working, and I thought I’d share a couple nice fiber-y things with you at the same time.

Up above there is a beautiful woven journal my Mom made me recently. The cover is a piece of saori weaving – she uses plain ol’ cardboard as her loom! (You can learn how she does this right over here.) I know I’m going to love using it.

…And, I’ve been taking yet another run at learning to knit. This time is going much better, thanks to the power of Twitter. How awesome is it to be able to whine about one’s knitting problems publicly, and then get showered with helpful advice and links? Extremely awesome.

So I’m making an attempt at a striped scarf, using leftover yarn from yet another crochet project that turned inexplicably hideous in my hands.

The fiber arts, they confound me. Happy Weekend, everyone!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Thanks, y’all, for all your feedback on whether a CraftyPod Facebook page would be useful. Enough of you answered in the affirmative that I went ahead and set one up.

Don’t worry – I won’t pester you to Like me or anything. If you can use it, my blog feed will be there. And if not, no worries. I’m not planning to set the world on fire with this thing – just to be in a place where many of you are now keeping up with blogs.

…And with that, I’m off to Chicago for the summer CHA show. I’ll be demo-ing the Kanzashi Makers for Clover again, and taking as many pictures as I can. Have a good week!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Skillshare is an online community marketplace for offline classes. You can scope out a teaching location in your community, and then submit your class idea through their website. If it’s approved, Skillshare will list your class on their website and help spread the word. They’ll also manage registrations and payments online, retaining a small service fee. (Or, if you teach a free class, there are no fees at all.)

If you’re new to teaching classes, you might also find their Resource Guide helpful - it covers designing a class, making a lesson plan, and marketing.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Hey, everyone – if you’re a reader of CRAFT, where I’m now Editor-in-Chief, can you please take a moment and fill our our new Reader Survey?

We want to know more about who’s reading us these days. What do you want to see more of on the site? What would you like to see less of? Take a few minutes and let us know, won’t you?

I’ll send you a big, crafty hug. Thanks!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Today, I have a lot of news and tidbits for you. Kind of a crazy-quilt post, I guess.

First up, I just wanted to share the above results of a swap we just completed over at Craft Social. For Valentine’s Day, we had a little I Heart Craft Social swap on Swap-Bot. On the left is the awesome steampunk-y heart Cyn made for me. And on the right is the heart I made for Barbara (who is my partner-in-Craft Social and by total coincidence, my swap partner.)

What fun! I wish I had more time for swappage.

Next, I wanted to share Genevieve’s upcoming online class, Pen & Ink Rose. If you’ve ever been curious about the ins and outs of pen and ink illustration, this class teaches them by focusing on a single subject. Above, you can see her cool video trailer for the class.

…And then speaking of drawing, I’ve been trying to develop a daily habit this year, and so far, failed. I’ve bought sketchbook after sketchbook, but their intimidating blankness keeps mocking me, and days go by.

Well, I chanced to mention this on Twitter recently, and as always, the community there came roaring to the rescue. Kalina (herself an avid drawer) suggested I do away with the fancy sketchbooks and just collect some junk mail to use as drawing paper. Much less intimidating that way, right?

I loved that idea, so I gathered up all the junk mail in the house. I opened the envelopes, cut them at the sides, and lopped off their flaps. Then I stapled them together at the fold, and now I have a really unattractive and thoroughly un-scary notebook. (I almost added a fabric cover, but even that would have been just fancy enough to mess with my brain.)

I’ve drawn something in this bad-boy three mornings in a row!

Also, Adelie suggested I look into Danny Gregory‘s work, which has been extremely helpful in helping me understand what drawing can be when we let go of all the things we think it should be.

That’s it for today, my friends! Happy Wednesday!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

I’ve been debating whether to blog about this for months now, since it’s a video game and this is not a video game blog. But, my friends, it’s a whole video game made ot craft supplies, so you really should see it.

(Also, full disclosure, my enjoyment of this game juuuuust ticked over into full-on obsession over the weekend.)

Anyway. Kirby’s Epic Yarn is part of a long series of Kirby games, but it’s the first one where the game characters and the land they inhabit are all made from fabric, yarn, buttons, lace, and miles of stitchery. Seriously, the amount of crafty goodness in this thing absolutely boggles the mind.

A quote from Kono, the game’s chief planner:

“We actually used yarn and literally sat there trying different things out and tossing around ideas. Craft materials were spread all across the desk. It didn’t look like we were working on a video game at all.”

There are seven landscapes in the game. You wander about, collecting shiny beads, looking for treasure, and defeating assorted (similarly crafty) enemies.

Many, many times I’ve been killed in-game because I was too busy oohing and aahing over the lace flowers and button-laden trees to notice the spear headed for me.

Fabric and yarn, of course, are malleable, and the game makes awesome use of this property. You can pull a loose thread and gather up a mountain. You can pull a zipper and a whole fabric building will peel away, revealing cool stuff behind it. Kirby himself, being made from a strand of pink yarn, can unwind himself and change into other things: a car, a spaceship, a heavy weight, and so on.

See that guy up there? The way you defeat him is to unravel the entire sweater perched on his head.

Want to see all this crafty cuteness in action? The video above gives you a taste.

The game’s website shows you more, and offers you the distraction of uploading your own photos and adding crafty Kirby elements to them. Fair warning, though: it’s a music-playing site.

If you are similarly obsessed, then please tell me in the comments how to defeat Meta-Knight.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Happy Valentine’s Day! Here are a few news items to start off your week:

First, if you’re around tomorrow, I hope you can join us for the Craft Social! It’s a monthly Twitter chat event Barbara and I organize. We have a different dicussion topic each month – and the February topic is Teaching Your Craft. Whether you’re a teacher or want to be one, come prepared to chat at high speeds about the ins and outs of teaching, and meet some cool people along the way.

(Pssst – we also have prize drawings.) The whole thing takes place from 2-4 pm EST on Twitter. Follow the hashtag #craftsocial. TweetChat is a great place to do this.

Next, Carina kindly published an interview with me on her blog (which has one of my favorite blog headers ever). It’s part of her Getting to Know You series, where she interviews makers about what makes them make.

You’re probably wondering whether I found a way to mention plastic canvas. Of course I did!

If you’re a yarn/fiber business owner near Portland, OR (or interested in a productive winter vacation), check out the Yarn Market News Smart Business Conference, happening next month. I’m super excited to be part of their illustrious speaker lineup this year! I’ll be doing a workshop on blogging for yarn store owners.

I am making a fancy animated Powerpoint at this moment.

And then lastly (but not leastly), my Mom is doing something pretty cool this month that you might want to check out. She’s spending February publicly thanking a different blogger each day for the inspiration and friendship they’ve given her. And this is no mere link list – Mom goes all out with a detailed post on each person, sharing her favorite links from their blogs, so each post is a rich source of inspiration.

Cool, huh?

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

I wanted to check back in with the Silhouette – partly, to share this little project I’m making for my favorite girl, and partly to answer your questions about the machine!

So, in addition to cutting paper and vinyl, the Silhouette has two kinds of iron-on transter material: smooth and flocked.

I thought it might be fun to add some initials to these little stuffies, so all I had to do was choose some fonts in the Silhouette software and flip the letters to reverse.

(Several of you wanted to know if you could import your own art from Illustrator into this software. The answer is “soon.” The software is currently in transition from an older version (called Robomaster) to a newer version (called Silhouette Studio). Silhouette plans to add the ability to bring in a JPEG image and trace its contours to make a cutting line, but current versions may not have that capability.

When you buy the machine, you’ll get automatic software updates, so when this feature is enabled, you’ll have it.)

The transfer material comes in a roll – you feed the end into the cutter. I did have a little fiddling to do, getting the curled material to lie flat, but it worked after only one botched attempt.

Then, you peel away the negative space, leaving your transfer on the plastic carrier.

…And then you get a pressing cloth and press the transfers. Easy peasy.

The whole process makes me want to make some kind of softie-based advent calendar thing. (But really, stop me right now. I have no time for that kind of project.)

Also, a few of you asked whether the Silhouette was Mac-compatible. It is, and newly so. The Silhouette Studio software is compatible for both systems. I run a Mac, and found the installation and user interface to be very simple.

…Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some little stuffies to sew.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Jo-Ann is organizing Craft for a Cause, and it works like this:

• Crafters from all over are making useful things and donating them to their favorite charities. If you take photos of what you made, you can enter them in the contest. The deadline is October 30th.

• The contest judges will choose the top five entries, and those makers will get a $1500.00 Jo-Ann gift card!

• Then, the three charities who receive the most donation entries will be finalists in the contest. Crafters will be able to vote for their favorite of these charities online.

The winning charity receives a $50,000 donation, the second place charity receives $20,000, and the third place charity receives $10,000.

What a great way to support charity crafting! If you want to enter, you can get all the details over here.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

Today, my friends, we’re just going to look at beautiful buttons. And breathe deeply.

This batch was an amazing gift from Margit, who sent them all the way from Denmark. Mom and I had a great time ooohing and aaahing over them – there are some really different styles in here.

(Aren’t these tiny flowers beautiful?)

Imagine these clip-style closures with all their rhinestones in place – what big-time glamor! I can almost picture the fabulous coat these graced once upon a time.

Heh – so I wanted to keep the bundle of three tied together, but I wanted to hide the black thread. I fiddled it and fiddled it – too lazy to walk down the hall and get some scissors. And when I finally had that thread perfectly hidden, I snapped the photo.

D’oh!!

(I adore the intricacy of these! The one with the branches and flowers – so pretty.)

There are some really intriguing carved ones, too. The material is clear, like Lucite, but has that hefty, warm feel of Bakelite. No idea what it is. But I love how the buttons look!

I’m thinking these once lived on a spectacularly crisp black shirt dress with red piping. They definitely have that Bakelite feel.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Margit’s blog. She designs all kinds of decorative papers and folded paper boxes, and offers some really stunning free downloads. (A lot of the posts are in Danish, but you can use Google Translate.

I have a lot of favorites on there, but this ladybug box, these butterfly baskets, and this amazing carousel will get you started.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

I’ve been having a lot of fun with my Silhouette – and will show you some results next week. But for now, I have two imminent endings to report:

1. The big giveaway ends tonight at midnight! UPDATE: The giveaway is now closed.

2. So does the awesome promo deal from Silhouette! Until midnight tonight, you can get:

• $50 off the Silhouette Craft Cutter (which comes with a cutting blade and two cutting mats)
• A roll of flocked white adhesive vinyl
• A roll of light blue smooth heat transfer material
• A roll of yellow flocked heat transfer material
• A Home Décor design CD (Valued at $50)
• A $10 Gift Card to the Silhouette Download Store

…for $249.99. which is a savings of $137.97.

Starting tomorrow, you can still get a good deal through October 4th. That’s:

• $50 off the Silhouette
• 2 rolls of heat transfer material
• A $10 Gift Card to the Silhouette Download Store

…for $249.99, which is a savings of $79.98.

Just use the coupon code POD at check-out.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

I had more awesome mail this week! This is actually a mysterious piece of art from Kirsty Hall.

Let me back up a little… Kirsty is a very smart, very talented artist in the UK. (You may remember her from this podcast, where we discussed her project of making a drawing on an envelope every day in 2007.)

I love the unique way Kirsty looks at art and the online world. She recently spun that envelope project into an experimental hybrid sort of product.

If you order from her, here’s what happens:

“Each envelope is completely unique and will consist of an envelope with your address on the front, a drawing on the back and a secret object, which might be another drawing, a letter, a photograph, a found object or something completely different.”

I ordered one right away. I love the idea that this envelope will contain something secret and chosen just for me, and that it has another original drawing on the outside.

The whole project is designed to make art more accessible to people who may not normally buy art. I’m a fan of anything that takes the stuffy out of fine art and connects people with artists.

…But what’s inside?

Ooh! This is beautiful! I have a cool blank book, and I can see this piece of art gracing the cover.

Kirsty mentioned to me that in some ways, this project has been “a bit of a stressful way to sell art.” I asked her about this. She said:

“If someone is buying a known item, then they’ve already decided they like it. But with the envelopes both the buyer & I are taking a leap of faith. The buyer is trusting that I will send them something they like, even though it’s a mystery.”

Personally, I really love that leap-of-faith aspect. This was a momentous piece of mail to get, and delightful to open.

You can check this project out over here, and definitely, give Kirsty’s blog a read. Her thoughts on art and life are always interesting.

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!

With Mother’s Day coming up (FAST!), my Mom and I decided to co-host a giveaway. She’s contributing something, and I’m contributing something.

My contribution is a set of four goodies I made on the Crafty Chica Cruise. They are…

One button bouquet, perfect for a desktop vase.

One reconstructed T-shirt pillow, ready for stuffing. (It has the cruise logo on the back!)

One wooden shrine, covered in glitter, buttons, and assorted pretties.

One hand-drawn silk scarf.

And then Mom is contributing…

… A copy of her ebook, (Not So) Sweets – so you can also make your Mom something yummy and low-sugar, and then give her the book.

So – one lucky winner gets all this bounty. To enter the drawing, post a comment here (or on Mom’s blog) and tell us what your plans are for Mother’s Day. We’ll draw a winner on Wednesday, May 5th, noon PST. There’s every possibility that you’ll receive these prizes in the mail after Mother’s Day – but you can always make your Mom a card and let her know they’re coming.

(International readers, you’re more than welcome to enter!) Good Luck!

UPDATE: Congratulations to our two winners! Holly, who commented at Mom’s blog, won the prize pack. And Bonnita, who commented here, won a second prize of a copy of the ebook!

CraftyPod is a blog about making crafts and making media. If you're seeing this post on another website, I'd love to know. Thank you!