Sunday, August 22, 2010

Look At You, Being All Crafty


I really love Christina Hendricks. We all know she is on Mad Men, one of my favorite shows of the moment. She was also in Joss Whedon's Firefly, which holds a special place in my heart, and makes her infinitely cooler. Much has been made of her goddess figure, and she is, whether she really wants to be or not, becoming the poster child for body acceptance, and the fashion industry allowing women to actually have hips and tits and not be forced to look like a 10 year old Asian boy. For this I thank her. Above all, she seems to accept this with grace, even though it has to become extremely irritating that anytime she is spoken about in an article it is about her body, and any adjectives used to describe her are not about her personality, but something akin to "The curvy star of Mad Men...blah blah blah". Her patience is far greater than mine.


Well now, she's just become about a billion times cooler. In a slightly manic daze of overconfidence in my own home-ec skills, I have recently decided that I am going to be a quilter. It turns out that Etsy.com is a really great place not only to find adorable and amazing finished crafts (and some other things), but some truly funky fabrics, and so I have been poring through Etsy for cute fabric like it's my job.


So today, I googled Etsy, and came across this little article in the Google News section about my new girlfriend from Today.com: Christina Hendricks is modeling scarves for her friend Tamara Mello on Etsy. COMEONHOWCOOLISTHAT?! My little crafting heart just went pitter patter. I wonder if she knits. I don't, but if she did, I would learn, so that if I ever met her, I could be like "hey, I knit too- want to come over and watch old movies and knit scarves together?" We could lounge in jammy pants and drink wine and eat too much whole-wheat pasta and talk about what Jon Hamm is like, and whether he really smells like cedar and fresh laundry (like he does in my mind).


Her friend's shop is Blackbird Design House, and it features all sorts of tasteful felted crafts. I actually don't understand felting. I have asked BFF (my crafting encyclopedia) about it a billion times, and I still don't understand how it works. Do you felt things onto things that are already knitted, like scarves? Do you just start with unwoven wool and punch it with a needle a billion times until it magically becomes a sweater? How do you make designs with it? Why would anyone want these felted soaps?

1 comment:

catfish said...

awesome! I am actually BFF's with maybe the best knitter who ever lived, and felting is a process of knitting something (like a scarf lets imagine), then you actually wash it so the fibers melt together (my own words, not sure if that's actually what happens), so they become felt- like