Brooklyn Crafts: DIY Event Recap and Pie Bake Off Benefit!

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 Thanks to everyone who attended the STC Craft and BurdaStyle Presents: DIY Design Day at 303 Grand's Perk Street Lounge (and to everyone who wished they could have attended!) this past Sunday in Brooklyn.

It was a great success! Thanks to online event promotion via the Daily News, Going, NY Post, Yelp, Time Out NY, 3^rd Ward, New York Magazine, Etsy, and BurdaStyle, we had over 100 RSVPs, and about that many passing through the space throughout the day.

 

We also raised $100 for the local non-profits BARC, Brooklyn's no-kill animal shelter, and Bags For The People, which hosts fabric-recycling, bag-making workshops, through our raffle and sale items:

Here's the lovely Carol of BurdaStyle, and the lovely Ellie of STC Craft, working the sales and info tables!

 

The first craft of the day was bag-making with Katherine Bell of Quilting For Peace, and Deanne of Bags For the People and I Jamaica.

Here are two ladies very happy with their wine bags...

 ...and folks in the thick of making the 30-Minute Shopping Bag from Quilting For Peace.

Thanks to Purl Patchwork in Soho for their donation of such gorgeous fabric!

Second project of the day was the Potato Printing with Heather Ross of Weekend Sewing. Can you believe her amazing potato stamps??!!

And finally, the last project was the Coffee Cup Cozy and Coater from Kata Golda's Hand-Stitched Felt!

Look Ma, I made this!

Alicia Kachmar, who donated a bunch of her adorable crafts for the raffle (and who you will meet in my next post,  the start of a series called "Friends of STC Craft", worked on this adorable "Safety Cone" cozy (work in progress)!

 Check out the adventures of her little Safety Cones and Kata Golda's little finger puppet friends here!

Stay tuned for my interview with Alicia, and the results of our raffle! Winners are being contacted now!

Thanks for reading!

P.S. If you are in Brooklyn this weekend, come to the 1st Annual Brooklyn Pie Bake Off Benefit for Bags For The People!

Our judges are heavily involved within the New York food and craft worlds, including our own Heather Ross (read her hilarious post about it here), Tracy Candido of Sweet Tooth of the Tiger, Julie Schneider, director of Etsy Labs, Chysanthe Tenentes of Brooklyn Based, and Tara Laruffa, marketing director of the Union Square Greenmarket.

Winners receive a Bags for the People bag filled with prizes: including a copy of the best-selling Baked cookbook (Stewart, Tabori and Chang), a copy of our best-selling Weekend Sewing book (which also features recipes!), and more! 

Best Overall gets all that, plus a pie feature on Etsy, and these fun things from BurdaStyle and Alicia Kachmar:

So come bake or just eat and be merry! Rules and info here: http://brooklynpiebake.tumblr.com

Design for a Living World

This video is part of the Design for a Living World exhibition on view at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City until January 4, 2010. Christien Meindertsma, featured in the video, is one of ten designers commissioned to develop new uses for sustainably grown and harvested materials in order to tell a unique story about the life-cycle of materials and the power of conservation and design. I find the video and Meindertsma's work (see more here) captivating.

STC Craft and Burda Style Present: DIY Design Day Benefit!

This is going to be a great event, for those of you who will be in Brooklyn November 14th!

To RSVP and for more information, click here!

V&A Patterns

I always love looking at books that showcase different patterns, so I was thrilled when I found out that that we (meaning Abrams, the company I work for and of which STC Craft is a part) would be distributing V&A Pattern, a series of pattern books from the publishers at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Each book includes over 65 pattern images, plus a CD with jpeg files of all of the images, ready to be viewed and manipulated for any non-commerical use. Below is a sampling of four of the patterns from each book. I love the idea of using these patterns to make customized stuff, such as gift wrap, note cards, notebook covers, screen savers, bookmarks, origami paper (or paper for nearly any paper craft), the list could go on and on. A few weeks ago my friend Hannah and I got together and made notebooks with patterns from the Fifties. I'll post a photo as soon as I take a decent one.

The Fifties
William Morris
Indian Florals
Digital Pioneers

Winner of the Kata Golda Hand-Stitched Felt Contest and Felt Photo Pocket Demo!

Congrats to Naomi, our lucky winner of a free copy of Kata Golda's Hand-Stitched Felt! Thanks to everyone who entered our contest. Stay tuned for Naomi's answer to the question: "What sort of adventures will your felty mice have?"

In the meantime, as a special consolation prize, here is the felt photo pocket demo that Kata did at the Etsy Labs in Brooklyn, NY.

This is a re-broadcast, in 2 parts, of the live webcast demo. There were some problems with sound, but hopefully these 2 videos will help fill in the gaps. Enjoy! I hope you'll be inspired to buy the book for friends and family (I plan on making nothing but felt gifts this year!)!

VIDEO LINKS:
• Felt Photo Pockets with Kata Golda (Part 1)
• Felt Photo Pockets with Kata Golda (Part 2)