MV Fiber Farm on Spinning Wool into Yarn

I may know a good deal about yarn, but I don't know much about how yarn is made other than sheep --> spindle --> skein --> shop.

This fantastic set of photos from Martha's Vineyard Fiber Farm shows exactly what happens to a fleece when it goes to the mill. And what a lovely old mill it is, too, with lots of antique equipment and not even a digital scale in sight.

photo from fiberfarm.com/2009/06/field-trip

Has the Renegade Craft Fair Jumped the Shark?

Last year, I loved the Renegade Craft Fair, a huge get-together of over 200 independent crafty types who congregated in (the empty) McCarren Park Pool on a searing hot weekend to sell their nifty wares. It's sponsored in part and heavily promoted by Etsy, an online marketplace made up of individual crafters (including yours truly, who as of this writing has made exactly one sale). The Fair's site proclaims that the offerings include "DIY knitting, jewelry, sewn items, paper goods, silkscreening, comics, zines and more!"

The fair has been expanding and adding locations every year since 2003, and it's truly a marvelous thing to see. The maze-shaped layout in the pool was perfect for meandering around, returning to booths and finding the refreshment trucks with ease.

This year, however, the Fair expanded to the perimeter of the park itself, along with some 35 booths-worth of overflow into the next-part-of-the-park-over, and with over 300 vendors it was just unmanageable. The layout was a huge square, and it was practically impossible to browse, make a mental (or even written) note of one's favorites and then return to a few booths to purchase. In addition, the vast number of silkscreened tee-shirts/onesies/aprons lent the whole Fair a homogeneous feel that I'm sure was not what the organizers intended.

The economics of craft fairs suck, and I'll be the first in line to tell you that it's impossible to sell fully hand-crafted goods at a price that even begins to cover your time. I have nothing against silkscreen; in fact, I even took an Etsy Labs silkscreening workshop last year. It's fun and you can create beautiful things. Once you've created your art and burned your screen you can make multiple prints with an ease that starts to make the financial numbers work, especially for a simple, one-color design. I'm not surprised that people silkscreen stuff to sell; I'm surprised that the Fair selected so many vendors with incredibly similar wares.

As a friend noted, when the fair is that huge, and so many of the offerings look pretty much the same, it's actually a more pleasant experience to do one's shopping from the comfort of one's own home, on Etsy.

I'd Like to Thank All the Little People

How much do I love this? Personalize it for your own mom at cnnbc.com.

My Pincushions are Cooler Than Your Pincushions

When I first started sewing, I disdained pincushions. After all, the standard-issue tomato/ strawberry combination that my grandmother gave me many years ago has held up for all this time, plus it has sentimental value. But then one too many cute tutorials crossed my path. I have a lot of small pieces of fabric just asking to be made into cool little things. And I sew in multiple rooms and am always carrying the pincushion around. And so it goes...

A New Post about The New Post

In my neighborhood, a great little diner called The New Post sits on a corner just across from the subway entrance. It should suffice to say that my son pretty much grew in utero on bacon, egg and cheese (on a croissant, no less) sandwiches from this fine establishment. While it's a classic New York breakfast joint, The New Post also proudly proclaims itself to serve Mexican food, and the tacos are a fine weekday substitute for the local taco truck, which doesn't show up until 8pm.

So it was truly disappointing what arrived when B ordered a plate of nachos yesterday. I understand that nachos aren't the most authentic of Mexican fare, but the plate of hard tortilla chips covered with canned refried beans, chunks of tomato and pepper, and hiding a pile of grilled chicken was topped with just-barely-melted orange American cheese. It was almost as if they were saying, "You can order this, but we don't have to be happy about making it."

thanks to Let's Meet up in Queens for the photo

What's Crafty This Week?

Do sewing machines have an overdrive setting? Mine needs one. In the past week I've sewn a sun hat, a baby kimono, five coffee cozies, and a pair of linen pants for the bug upcycled from a pair of his father's cast-offs. A toddler camp shirt is in the planning stages, as is a skirt for myself, thanks to my recent gift of Heather Ross's new book, Weekend Sewing.

Thanks to the kind folks at Whip Up (and the Random Number Generator), I'm now the proud owner of Betz White's new book, Sewing Green.

How crafty is it around here? Let's set the Craft-o-Meter to 7 this week.

Wait for It

"The bug" stuck. The bug is now two and ready for the debate team.

While raising my infant son, I got crafty. I've been knitting for some time, but during the past two years I've dusted off the sewing machine, plugged in the hot melt glue gun, and otherwise channeled my inner Martha Stewart. This week I bought a needle felting kit and created an apple, most of a little elf, and a bird on a nest. I'm pleased to report that I stuck myself only twice, which I owe entirely to my fear of sharp pointy objects.