Andrew Salomone wrote a project for CRAFT, in which is guides you though creating a pair of retro-style running shoes from old tires and a busted pair of jeans. It’s upcrafting month on CRAFT, where we explore all the possibilities surrounding repurposed, recycled, and refashioned crafts!
In response to our Maker Business coverage, I got a wonderful email from Fran Shea of Zeichen Press. She wanted to tell us about her foray into the small letterpress business she started with her sister-in-law, Jen. Being a huge letterpress fanboy, how could I resist? Here’s a short interview I conducted with Fran. — […]
The half life lamp by Joris Laarman is apparently powered by living, bioluminescent hamster cells.
By Andrew Salomone A few years ago a friend of mine brought me to a little town in Mexico to see the Tarahumara race. The Tarahumara are an indigenous people who live in a massive canyon and run incredible distances in sandals, called huaraches, made from old car tires. When I tried to wear a […]
I didn’t know such a thing as scientific cookies existed, or even that a round up (or two) were needed to show off all the flavors and possibilities that creative people have come up with. But now I realize I was living in the plain white flour and possibly moldy pantries of mundane cookiedom. Why […]
After taking a great surface design class, I find myself drawn to new methods of altering fabric. I love seeing this method of gel glue batik, a process in which the resist (usually hot wax) is replaced with kids’ blue gel glue from the school supply aisle. Jennifer of Swallowfield got this lovely resulting design […]
No, they don’t call themselves that. “Bamboobender” is my hackish take on “sandbender,” which many of you folks will probably recognize as a term coined by arch-cyberpunk William Gibson in his novel Idoru. Very roughly, a “sandbender” is a craftsperson who makes a living by carefully hand-crafting ornate enclosures for mass-produced electronics. We don’t see a lot of that, at least in the first world (although mass-produced after-market “custom” enclosures and enclosure-decorations are common), probably because our personal electronics are still pretty ephemeral to us: we all know we’re probably going to be sporting a new phone and/or MP3 player next year. This example, however, comes from Cameroon, where, I presume, the device turnover rate is a lot lower. It’s the work of teacher and wordworker Lekuama Ketuafor, whose runs a sole-proprietorship cottage industry called Bamboo Magic. [via AfriGadget]
