…So, Christina and I are hard at work on our book. We’re finalizing our chapter on basic tips and techniques.

And this got us thinking about all the craft books on our respective shelves, and all the “basics” chapters in them, and how often they seem to cover a lot of the same ground. So, we thought we’d ask you: in a quilting book specifically, what tips and techniques would you like to see? What stuff have you already seen too much of? And what’s been missing from the books you already own?

Feel free to comment on Christina’s post (where there are already some awesome suggestions), or here. We really appreciate your input!

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

Wowee, I loved this video – and I hope it gives you a good send-off into your weekend, too.

Given my ongoing dry spell, I’m compelled by this idea that the frustration of not-knowing is an important part of the cycle of creating. (Jonah Leher’s book, which this video illustrates, is already on my wish list.)

Plus, I’m a big fan of Flash Rosenberg‘s “live drawing” animation style. (Many thanks to Theresa Robinson for sharing this on Google+!)

Enjoy, my friends! Happy Weekend!

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

Pssst: if you want to get in on this week’s discussion over on Google+, we’re talking about trends. I’m interested in these questions:

What are trends for, anyway? Do they serve any purpose other than driving sales? Why do we humans need them?

How much do trends figure into your personal creative work? How much do trends figure into your business?

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Join us at G+!

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

I was lucky enough to be on Twitter a couple weekends back when Garth tweeted a link to this beautiful piece on CNN’s Living blog, about women in their 60′s and beyond who enjoy being stylish in a very creative, self-defined way.

What’s especially cool about these ladies? Some of them maintain fashion blogs! I couldn’t add them to my RSS reader fast enough.

So, my vote for “Freaking Geniuses” of the month goes to:

Valerie and Jean of Idiosyncratic Fashionistas

These two ladies go to fabulous events, dressed fabulously, and then take lots of photos of what everyone’s wearing. Their commentary is fun, with not a trace of the snobbery that often turns me off with fashion press in general. This bit from their About Me statement is worthy of a tattoo: “We embrace our gray hair, while sharing the playground nicely with our younger siblings. Bette Davis was right when she said ‘growing old is not for sissies’, but it’s also not one of Dante’s circles of hell.”






Judith Boyd of Style Crone

Judith’s blog isn’t just about style, but also a chronicle of the role fashion her played in her journey though her husband’s battle with cancer. I’m so deeply inspired by her determined affirmations of life a year after his death, and by the way her style helps her express the emotional landscape she’s traversing.








All of the beautiful ladies in Advanced Style

This blog is actually the work of 30 year-old photojournalist Ari Seth Cohen. In it, he documents gracious and gorgeous people over 50 – people who are taking care of themselves and enjoying their place in the world. It’s delightful and inspiring, and the women are so, so beautiful.

Some favorites: 100 year-old Ruth doing Pilates and 60-something ladies answering questions on how they feel about aging and style.

Image by Joel Abroad, via Flickr

I’m 45 now, and I’ll tell you… this seems to be the age where tiny, subtly dismaying changes start showing up in your face and body. It’s not anything to get insane over, but it’s something that starts blipping in the back of your mind, like a tiny signal from your future. Especially in the grossly youth-obsessed culture we inhabit, it’s all too easy to get convinced that your prime is passing.

I love how these blogs make me think, “Oh, to hell with that!”

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

Just a quickie post, to celebrate the beginning of farmer’s market season here in PDX! And so begins my weekly project of immortalizing pretty produce. And then buying it. And then cooking and eating it.

The walking around photographing felt especially nice in the light of my current creative slump. It felt really good just to react to colors and shapes. I could feel the fog lifting a little. And we had a lovely time exploring with K’s parents.

Oh, and the flowers! The tulips seem a little later than usual, but they’re out in such amazing profusion. The colors of Spring flowers have a vibrancy the rest of the year can’t quite match.

(I know these aren’t tulips. I was waxing rhapsodic. Daffodils are awesome, too.)

For those who enjoy such things (um, Mom and Donna), I just fired up the 2012 Farmer’s Market Flickr set, which has more of today’s images.

Hope you’re enjoying your weekend! Here’s where that asparagus is headed tonight.

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

You’re getting this show free for 30 days thanks to the CraftyPod Shop!

That’s right, my online store is bringing you this show! If you enjoy this podcast, I’d be so grateful if you’d stop by and check out my ebooks, online classes, and – ahem – premium podcast subscriptions for sale.

This podcast is filled with BIG, fascinating ideas about the intersection of creativity and spirit. How do you find your own personal meaning in making things? Can art or craft (or any other creative pursuit) actually become a spiritual practice? How can creative work be spiritual and exist alongside your existing spiritual beliefs?

We have an excellent guide through all these questions this week: Bridget Benton is a mixed-media artist and a teacher who specializes in just this subject. Her book, The Creative Conversation, is based on classes she’s been teaching for years. She helps creative people uncover the ways that making things feeds their souls – and how regular making can become an important path to staying grounded and understanding your place in the world.

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Enjoy These Links:

• Bridget’s website is a gateway to her book, The Creative Conversation (which is, by the way, an indie publishing project in paper form!)

• You can also occasionally find Bridget at her blog, on Twitter and on Facebook.

• In the interview, Bridget mentioned Eric Booth‘s book, The Everyday Work of Art.

• Mark McGuinness has a great post on What Daily Meditation Can Do for Your Creativity, at The 99%.

• If you missed it, this documentary on Art as Spirituality from the PBS art21 series is excellent.

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

Hello! Just popping in with a pair of news items here. (I’m writing this in the voice of Eddie Izzard, but you probably can’t tell. Right.)

Image by halilgokdal, via Flickr

OK, so first (reverting to my own voice now), a quick follow-up to our discussion about Google+. I’ve started a little project of posting one discussion topic per week over there. This week, we’re talking about how you set your own boundaries around what you do and don’t share on your blog. When the going gets tough in your personal/creative life, what does that look like in your online persona?

There are a lot of interesting perspectives happening over there – want to join in?

Image by Brian R. Jones, used with permission.

…And second, I had a great time being a guest on the Brian R. Jonescast this week. Brian’s a ceramics artist with an academic background, and we had a deep conversation on the differences between his perceptions of the indie craft movement, and my perceptions of the fine craft movement.

You can find the show on iTunes. Pull out your plastic canvas project and settle in! (I know you have one stashed somewhere secret.)

And with that (reverting back to Eddie here), Cheers, Mates.

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

Image by samk, via Flickr

Money continues to be pretty tight around here, post-tax-paying, but whatever! This project must go on.

I’m stepping a little out of the crafty realm with my Free support this month. K and I attended one of our favorite events of the year over the weekend, the Stumptown Comics Fest. Portland is blessed with a rich comics culture, and this festival a hub of amazing artists and writers.

(Wanna watch me nerd out on a previous year’s Festival, while wearing an awkward growing-out hairdo? You’re in luck!)

Image by SerenityRose, via Flickr

Anyway. It struck me that what so many comics artists are doing is similar to what many craft bloggers are doing: putting out high-quality free content online and hoping for sales/donations. And, just as in the online craft community, it can be challenging to gain widespread enough support from readers to compensate the hours you spend making that Free.

Making a story-based (as opposed to a single-joke-based) comic involves hundreds (or thousands) of hours of work, but your readers can read it in a few seconds if they want to – so it can be easy for them to forget those long hours of effort.

Image by badlyricpolice, via Flickr

..And yet, it’s effort well worth supporting. Comics have mind-blowing potential to communicate, to teach, and to transform. They’re also one of the most vibrant branches of indie publishing.

So, this month, in addition to supporting a few favorite comic-makers directly at the show, I made a donation to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund – an organization that provides legal support to comics creators, publishers, librarians and readers, seeking to protect all these groups’ First Amendment rights.

Do you read any web comics? Which ones? Do any of them have a donation button somewhere?

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

We had a great discussion a while back about how blogging is changing. We talked about the “post keeping-up era,” where all of us are tending to let go of the ideal of staying current with hundreds of blogs. And we talked about what this means for bloggers in terms of audience numbers.

Today, I thought we might look at an idea related to all that. I think that as we move forward in this rather splintered blogging and social media environment, one blogging skill becomes really important: curation.

Image by Walters Art Museum, via Flickr

So, what does a curator do?

Well, here’s what Wikipedia says:

“A [curator is a] content specialist responsible for an institution’s collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material.”

If we inject a little juice back into that rather dry language, I’d say that a curator creates an idea-space, and then chooses things to decorate that idea-space.

To me, this is exactly what we do with our blogs. Each blog represents some particular idea – whether it’s a personal journal or a company’s announcement stream. And as a blogger, your work involves looking at the whole world of stuff and deciding what fits into your idea-space.

Image by Wolverhampton Arts + Heritage, via Flickr

I think curation is one of those deceptively subtle ideas that’s easy to grasp on the surface, but just as easy to lose sight of when you’re confronted with that age-old problem of “what should I blog about?”

I mean, it’s easy to see curation in action on blogs like CRAFT and Craft Gossip, where editors comb the web for stuff and then share brief, visual snippets. These editors choose things to share that fit within the overall theme of the site – stuff on CRAFT tends to be a little more techy and nerdy than stuff on CraftGossip.

But what if you have a more personal blog, and you don’t share a lot of things from around the web? Well, curation is still a very valuable skill. It just looks a little different.

Image by bsferro, via Flickr

What’s the theme of your “show?”

For starters, curation looks like choosing what to share from around your personal life, from around your business, and from around your creative world. And how do you choose? You do what a museum curator does: you start with a specific idea.

Think about the museum or gallery shows you’ve visited. What are their specific themes? Sometimes they focus on one artist’s work from a particular period. Sometimes they take a group of artists from a specific era. Sometimes they bring together a lot of works in a single medium. Sometimes they collect art from lots of artists in lots of media, but representing one subject, like houses or portraits or flowers.

Do you know what specific idea (or group of ideas) your blog represents? If you’ve been having trouble getting a handle on blogging, or growing much audience, this might be a good place to focus. What are you about as a blogger? What is this idea-space you’re building?

Image by -Jeffrey-, via Flickr

What is the size and depth of your “gallery space?”

(That’s right, we’re gonna torture this metaphor to death!) So, curators choose a theme, but then they also need to respect the boundaries of their museum or gallery space. How many paintings will fit on the walls? How much pedestal space is there for the ceramics? The space limitations force a curator to look for the most important works that represent her theme.

This idea applies to blogging in two ways. First, we simply have less “space” in our readers’ attention spans than we did five years ago. We used to all recommend blogging daily in order to “stay on the radar” of potential customers. But at this point, with readers paying less attention to RSS feeds and more attention to random links floating through their social media accounts, we’re just not under that same frequency requirement anymore. Nowadays, it makes more sense to say something when there’s something really good (or important) to say.

Image by linkerjpatrick, via Flickr

Another way that this space-limitation idea applies to blogs is that the idea-space you create for your blog may be broader or narrower in scope, and this may also effect how frequently you need to post.

Think of this: the aforementioned CRAFT covers a giant swath of creative culture: art and craft, every medium you can think of, plus food and tech and publishing. With that broad of a scope, there’s lots of ideological “space,” and more room for more posts per day.

But for many personal or small-business blogs, the focus is much narrower – a single craft, perhaps. A specific range of knitwear design. A particular visual style. And in these smaller idea-spaces, there’s simply less room. You might actually have a more effective blog with fewer posts, chosen because they align beautifully with your blog’s theme. Filler posts, slapped up there for the sake of posting, just serve to muddy the message.

Image by Marshall Astor, via Flickr

What about those little plaques on the walls next to the paintings?

When I go to museum shows, I’m one of those people who obsessively read all the text information hanging on the walls. I want to know what the background of the show is, and how each piece is significant, and how all the pieces relate to each other. At the very least, I want an artist statement so I have some handle on what the artist’s approach and philosophy are.

If you’re a good blog-curator, then you’re providing your readers with this kind of background information, too. I mentioned this earlier this week, but in the craft community, I think we’re getting a little lazy about our discourse. We’ve let all the pretty things take center stage without trying to give them much context. We hold stuff up and say “Isn’t this cool?” and then other people say “Yes, that’s really cool!” – but how long can that stay truly interesting?

Image by -Jeffrey-, via Flickr

As a blog-curator, you can really stand out right now simply by helping your readers understand WHY you’ve shared the things you’ve shared. If you’re posting a roundup of links to great tutorials from around the web, for example, tell us WHY you chose each one – and I’m betting that if you dig a little, you can find a reason deeper than “they’re really cool.” How do they represent the way you see your world? What do the colors evoke in you? Why are you drawn to that medium?

If you’re posting about one of your WIP’s, similar questions apply: why did you choose this pattern? What appealed to you about the yarn/fabric/beads? Actually, this element of WHY is one of the most effective ways to bring significance, authenticity, and interest to a blog post. Then next time you’re in mid-post, try asking yourself “why am I sharing this?”, and answer your own question in that post.

…What do you think? Do you see yourself as a curator? What are you curating?

If you want to go deeper into giving your own blog a kick-start, grab a seat in my upcoming online class, Craft Blog Tune-Up. It’s my most popular class, and has helped many bloggers tweak their blogs into sounding better, looking better, and engaging better. We start Monday, May 7th!

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

So, this month my thinking about online information diet health centered around Google+. Boy, would I love for it to be a better social media tool for the craft community.

Don’t get me wrong – it is a wonderful social media tool. In my opinion, much better-designed and usable than Facebook. (I’ve made no secret of my feelings about FB here.)

…The problem is, I just don’t see much of interest going on over there from a creative standpoint. When G+ came to town, a bunch of us signed up and then I pretty much saw one of two things happening:

• People simply feeding their blogs, tweets, or Facebook posts over to G+
• People posting momentary Twitter-style updates

I’ve already talked about the first of these – if you’re going share the same information I already follow elsewhere, then I can’t tune into you on more than one channel. And the second approach makes sense from a human-nature standpoint, but to my eye, it doesn’t really make for very interesting G+.

Every time G+ comes up in a crafter conversation, I hear a lot of “I just don’t know what to do with it” or “I don’t really need another social network.” And I think this is simply because we’re not using G+ to its full potential.

I agree that if you love Facebook, then you’ll probably see too many similarities to really get into G+. But I think that for those of us who love Twitter, G+ gives us a wonderful opportunity for real, substantive discussion, without the character limit that can sometimes hamper us in going very deep on Twitter. For those of us who love blogs, G+ allows for the comment discussion without needing to go through all the work of producing full blog posts.

“Substantive” is another problem – and here’s where I might sound like I’m being mean to crafters. That’s not my intention at all.

I do think that we crafters have become accustomed to two broad categories of discourse online. On blogs, we’re often holding up things we’ve made and saying “Isn’t this cool?” and then people reply with some variation on “Yes, that’s really cool!” And in social media spaces, many of our conversations are based around “This is what I’m doing right now.” and “I’m doing that too/I understand doing that/I wish I were doing that.”

Are these things bad? HECK, NO!!! I love both modes, and participate in them constantly. It’s just that G+ affords us a clean slate on which to build a new kind of conversation. If we could stop imposing our habitual online conversations onto it, then imagine what we could be doing over there:

Image by AEJHarrison, via Flickr

• With the G+ Circle system, we can converse with much better flexibility and specificity. On both Twitter and Facebook, we basically have only two communications options: we talk to everyone, or we reply to one person. But on G+, we can share/converse with smaller sub-groups that have more tightly-connected interests. Thanks to Circles, we have an opportunity to be more thoughtful about who we share with and what we share with them. We can have any support communities we want, and we can move beyond broadcast thinking and into a whole new level of connecting in many substantive ways with many people, with less overload.

• With G+’s 100,000 character limit (yes you read that correctly), we have an opportunity to go beyond “I’m standing in line at the post office” and talk about what it really means to be a creative person, how we cultivate and manage our creative lives, and what our work means. We can not only share links to articles on the web that we found meaningful, we can also go beyond “Great post!” and share what we actually thought when we read it.

• Since G+ has embedded live chat (and video Hangouts), we can schedule awesome salon-style discussions of specific topics. We can come together in focused spaces and go really deep in conversation, learning from each other in the process. I love the idea of learning communities, and I think crafters are naturals for those kinds of spaces.

I am not saying, by the way, that G+ should replace either Twitter or Facebook. I’m not saying anyone “should” be on G+. I’m just saying that here’s a tool that can bring us a whole new (and to my mind, deeper) social media experience, if we’d only be willing to approach it a little differently. We’re creative souls and nice people, and if we could get past using it as yet another promotional/broadcast tool, it seems to me like we could do some wonderful things with G+.

What are your thoughts? Have you used Google+? How is/was the experience for you? What kinds of conversations are missing for you online?

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

All images in this post are by Michele Pacey, and used with permission.

You’re getting this show free for 30 days thanks to Audible and SCRAP!

Audible is the internet’s leading provider of digital audio entertainment, with over 100,000 audiobooks and other shows in just about every genre you can think of.

Sign up for their service today, using this link, and you can get a free audiobook download!






SCRAP is a creative reuse center, where you can get an amazing variety of affordable materials for your art and craft projects. It’s all been rescued from the waste stream, so you can make things and know that you’re also making a positive impact. SCRAP is located in Portland, Oregon – with satellite locations in Traverse City, Michigan, Washington D.C. and Denton, Texas.

Stop by the website and show them some love for sponsoring this show!

Since it’s nearly Earth Day, Michele Pacey and I are talking about creative reuse. Michele does most of her crafting with materials from her recycle bin, and she comes up with all kinds of beautiful and useful projects. Her blog, Michele Made Me, is full of inspiration.

Creative reuse involves a lot of experimentation, trial and error, and flat-out play. Michele has some interesting things to say about how she approaches crafting with recycled materials. And, I made her tell me what’s in her stash right now – um, wow! There’s a lot of creative potential there.

I hope this show will inspire you to dig into your recycle bin and make some cool things this weekend.

Some Creative Reuse Links:

• Go play around in Michele’s blog, Michele Made Me. Click on her tutorial section in particular. You’re welcome!

• You can learn to make some of Michele’s amazing projects in her tutorial shop, including those adorable egg carton ornaments above.

• …Now, let’s link to the projects Michele mentioned during the interview, starting with this origami blow-up balloon.

• Michele’s series of projects made from an old towel has added an oven mitt since I recorded this show!

• Here, you can see Michele’s junk mail crafts, including the Kusudama. (If you’ve never made a kusudama before, here’s how.

• …And here’s that video tutorial, which shows you how to make plant pots from newspaper.

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

Today, we have a glimpse of a very fun book. The author, Shawn Bowman, is a local crafter with a penchant for the macabre, the dastardly and the devious. And she’s put together a quirky collection of projects for grown-ups (and maybe older kids who don’t mind being led into a figurative life of crime.)

Criminal Crafts: From D.I.Y. to F.B.I. Outlaw Projects for Scoundrels, Cheats, and Armchair Detectives contains 31 simple projects in a variety of media. Beginning crafters and non-crafters could execute most of them just fine – the point is to explore the fun of the “criminal element” in them.

…As in this poetry journal in honor of Bonnie Parker (of Bonnie and Clyde fame). She apparently wrote poems between heists! I love the “bullet holes” in the cover here.

The projects cover useful items for a life of crime (like this invisible ink), fashion accessories, recipes, and some home decor.

Basically, you have everything you need here to throw a lot of fun parties. Many of the projects are just perfect for a “walk up and make it” environment.

Two things here: a) excellent messenger bag made from duct tape and crime scene tape! And b) that guy may be my favorite craft book model of all time.

Or is he? Here’s the author herself, modeling her Martha’s No-Knit Prison Poncho. Dang, we should all be models in our own craft books, don’t you think?

Two things from the recipes chapter I especially loved: these Crime Scene Gingerbread Men, done in in many cruel ways…

…And the “Flaming Amy.” The “Amy” in question is cut from beef jerky, set into a concoction of savory spices and rum, and then set aflame. Make mine a double,

A side note: the art direction throughout the book is just splendid, and Shawn’s writing is hilarious, as it is on her blog.

I usually comment on a book’s instructional quality, so I’ll say that every project has nice, clear photos. diagrams, or full patterns to take you through the steps.

(I’ll also say that I’m the proud owner of a pair of these rear-view sunglasses, made by the author. And they really do let me see who’s behind me. Which comes in handy sometimes.)

The best thing about this photo is that, without the Crime Scene Carpet, this room could have come right out of the pages of a 1970′s Better Homes & Gardens decor book.

…The chalk outline of a body only makes things way better!


Disclosure time: Andrews McMeel sent me a review copy. The title link above is an affiliate link. You watch yourself or you’ll be sleeping with the fishes, see?

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

I’ve been trying to write this post for nearly four years. It’s difficult and complicated to say what I want to say, in a way that doesn’t sound any of the ways I fear it will sound. I’m grateful to Tara, Elizabeth and K for their feedback and suggestions.

Even the reasons why I want to write about this subject are complicated and hard to articulate. Here’s the thing: I’ve been a member and a watcher of the online crafty community for nearly seven years now. I’ve seen crafty celebrities come and go, and I’ve watched some interesting new breeds of celebrity form in the internet age.

For the most part, I don’t think fame or celebrity are necessarily bad things (more on that in a moment). But as I’ve watched the crafty community grow and evolve online, I’ve also watched this idea of “crafty celebrities” engender not-so-great things like envy, assumptions and judgements without information. I think these not-so-kind responses to celebrity happen largely because of outdated mindsets. And I think that some powerful new ideas are emerging about celebrity now.

So here, for better or worse, is what I’ve been thinking about. I hope we can have a nice, productive discussion of this subject in the comments.

Image by djwudi, via Flickr

We (Apparently) Need Our Celebrities

Here’s what’s interesting to me: we humans create celebrities everywhere. Every special interest community has its own celebrities: cooking nerds have folks like Ina Garten and Jamie Oliver. Video gamers have Billy Mitchell. Photographers have Ansel Adams. We even create celebrities in our local communities – like here in Portland, we have Storm Large. There are always people (and, in our online community’s case, bloggers) whose names we say with a special significance in our voices.

It used to be that we all knew of mostly the same celebrities, because the mainstream media used to tell us who was and was not famous. But then the web gave us the ability to share our own stories, and then we splintered into a million niches, and each one evolved its own celebrities.

What, exactly IS this kind of niche celebrity, then? I think that, at best, it’s basically a public declaration of admiration: “I think what you do is amazing, and far beyond what I think I can do.” I think we need our celebrities because they can create positive standards that help us keep striving to learn and grow and get better at whatever it is we do. Elizabeth suggested to me that what we’re really creating here isn’t so much celebrities as heroes, and I like that distinction.

Image by CAA Photography, via Flickr

Ambivalence About Celebrities

So, when we’re in a good frame of mind, our celebrities can give us targets to aspire to. But we’re human, so we don’t always stay in that good frame of mind. In a bad frame of mind, sadly, our celebrities can make us feel smaller and less-interesting and less worthy. (Notice: the celebrity hasn’t done anything different. Only our minds have.)

To pull an example from our community, let’s think about that fabled “perfection veneer” of many crafty blogs. On a good day, these blogs transport you do a prettier, more organized world, and you think the blogger is amazing and inspiring. On a bad day, they can make you feel horrid for having piles of laundry and dirty dishes, and you think the blogger must be some kind of stuck-up jerk.

…Given that we may have never met this blogger, or have any reliable window into her life, these careening judgements seem a bit unfounded, don’t they? I have a theory on why we yo-yo between these two extremes. It’s because essentially, our world contains two different kinds of celebrities:

• People we’ve made into personal celebrities because we value the things they’ve done
• People we’ve been told are celebrities by someone else.

Image by stevelyon, via Flickr

When We Let the Media Make Our Celebrities

Celebrity goes wrong, I think, when we get too passive about it and let other people tell us who we should be paying attention to. And frankly, it’s hard not to let other people tell us who the celebrities are – mainstream media constantly capitalizes on celebrity to sell newspapers/magazines/ad slots/anything else you can imagine.

The problem with that is, we get fed a steady stream of people we did not choose as celebrities. The danger happens when we accept their celebrity at face value without checking to see whether, all things being equal, we would really find them significant to us. Because we didn’t take an active role in making them celebrities, we’re far more likely to have those backlash feelings – and perhaps we feel safer about doing it? (One word: Kardashian.)

Closer to home, I see this kind of thing going on with mainstream craft media all the time. I regularly get press releases that babble about “the hottest crafters and the coolest projects,” or that tout one crafter or another as being a “crafty superstar,” “crafty powerhouse,” or “famous crafter.” (Sigh. Press release language.) If I listen to the mainstream craft media, I’m presented with a whole range of celebrities, and expected to assume that they’re worthy of my admiration.

It’s this mainstream media capitalization on fame that leads, I think, to many of us taking what are, at the end of the day, fellow human beings, and treating them like commodities.

Image by RobW, via Flickr

Celebrity is Now a Personal Thing

Ok, so all of that said, let’s not get too gloomy about celebrity, because as it turns out, the internet age can make celebrity exciting again. The web can free us once and for all from imposed mass-media celebrity, if we’ll only let it. We each get to make our own personal “pantheon” of people who are significant to us, and we get to decide why they’re significant.

Let me rephrase that in very pointed language: nobody – no magazine, no website, no TV show – has the authority to tell you who’s worthy of your attention. Create all the heroes you want, but do it because they’re super good at something that’s important to you. Use your celebrities as positive, motivating role models, not as reasons to feel bad.

You get to decide how important fame and famous people are to you – and incidentally, you are equally wonderful with or without them.

Whew! I may need to lie down now. But I would love to hear what you think. Why do people become celebrities to you? Do you ever find yourself feeling abivalent about celebrities? How much do you tend to listen when the mainstream media annoints someone as a “celebrity crafter?”

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

First, I’ve been so enjoying our discussion about creative dry spells this week! Your comments have given me some great food for thought, and some ideas on how to mitigate future dry spells. Thank you so much, as always, for your most-excellent brains.

I thought we’d have something very self-care-oriented today, since self-care really is at the heart of keeping those creative impulses flowing. Deb Roby made this excellent video of stretches for crafters a while back, and I still use it from time to time. Try it – you’ll feel amazing afterward!

…And have a lovely weekend, my friends.

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!

So, I mentioned this on Monday, but I’ve been in the midst of one of those creatively-spent periods lately. It came on mostly without warning a few weeks ago – one day, I was working away on my plastic canvas tiki gods, crocheting a blanket and choosing sewing patterns for spring and summer clothes. And the next day, I was all “Meh. Crafts.”

(I say “mostly without warning” because I’ve been burning my candle at both ends since January. A brownout was bound to happen sooner or later.)

I know these fallow periods happen to all creatives, but each time I hit one, it scares the bejeezus out of me. What if that’s all there is? What if I never feel like making anything ever again?

That’s all bunk, of course. To stop making things would be like stopping breathing – and I’ve lived through some years where I did no making, so I know there’s a distinct lack of oxygen there. What actually scares me is that I don’t get to know when this dry spell will be over. I prefer things I can schedule, plan for, and control.

I find that I go through a few stages when these dry spells hit. First, I resist them, pushing myself to pick up that crochet hook, or do just a little stitching, or at least make a few danged notecards. But soon I have to accept that the resulting work is as dull as my inspiration is, and set it aside.

…That’s when I really go into resistance mode, and start up all kinds of ambitious new projects, as if that were all I needed to get re-invigorated. This time around, I decided to start drawing a graphic novel, make us a quilt, and fire up yet another unfinished hexie project. I usually make a lot of notes and think about what will happen when I officially start on all this stuff, but ultimately I don’t do a thing.

If only this reality were as easy to achieve in real life!

…So at that point, I usually start wallowing. I watch a lot of TV, and chide myself for watching a lot of TV, and watch some more TV. And I play lots of video games. And I get crabby.

Someone quite enjoys dry spells, because there’s usually more cuddle time in it for him.

… And after that part, things generally finally start looking up. Because somehow, when the wallowing and crabbiness are finished, I find myself starting to take in ideas again. Maybe I look at more books and magazines, or maybe I take more walks around downtown, or maybe I get motivated to re-organize my fabric stash. (Please, please, can I get motivated to re-org my fabric this time around?)

The day always comes, sooner or later, when I can pick my projects back up and feel the same excitement. Right now, I’m sure looking forward to that day!

What about you? How do you pass through your creative dry spells? How long do they last? Do you have any practices to help you prevent them?

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! Subscribe to the CraftyPod 2.0 podcast!