The original for this is a sketch for a tattoo I found last summer and fell a little in love with.

Here’s a good tutorial on how to make your own prints. Via TIGER c/o SEWICIDE.

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I am creating a series of dolls that focus on the inherent beauty of all.

The purpose of the series is to subvert the typical concept of “beauty” by using a traditional feminine housewifery type of skill to create modern depictions of of everyone’s beauty.

And Amy is looking for more ‘models’ for her dolls.

I’m looking for all types of women, hetero and homo ladies, womyn, lesbians, bois, butches, transmen, drag queens, queers, and femmes to be a part of my series. I want to celebrate the beauty I see in women everyday.

You just need to send her a full length photo (clothed if you want) and a couple of details. For more info, check out her website

I really like this project. It’s not too often you see issues of body image being challenged in the craft world. There is still a dominance of dolls with completely unnatural body proportions, especially the creepy big eyes! Very nice to see someone challenging the dominant images.

Remember there are no good or bad bodies, just $50 Million advertising campaigns.

Amy also has an etsy store, you can check out here. This is my favourite!

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I’m there!

Thanks Mikes and the Kuties

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The great news is that now it’s done! Well, it’s opening in an exhibition next weekend so it must be pretty close. So for you lucky people in London, you can get along and check it out.

It’s part of the Open Source Embroidery Exhibition:

This exhibition explores the connections between the collaborative characteristics of needlework, craft and Open Source software. This project has brought together embroiderers, patch-workers, knitters, artists and computer programmers, to share their practice and make new work.

Other works in the exhibition include Susanne Hardy’s Knit-a-Blog, a collective knitting project made by contributors from across the UK and USA, Iain Clarke’s PHP Embroidery, which explores the open source PHP programming language as a form of self-generating weaving, as well as artworks by Paul Grimmer, Tricia Grindrod, Jake Harries & Keith o’Faoláin, John Keenan, Trevor Pitt, Clare Ruddock, James Wallbank, and Lisa Wallbank.

And if you do get to check it out, look for my little patch, located somewhere in the top left of the quilt!

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Craft collaborations are great projects to be involved in ’cause you don’t have to do very much but there’s still a wickedly awesome outcome.  Craft Victoria is helping promote a collaboration which doesn’t require any craft skills whatsoever!  So those of you who are still holding out on me might want to join in.  I’m gonna send some threads in, so I’ll keep you posted.

Loose threads are one of life’s little problems.

Left unattended our buttons fall off,
our seams unravel,
our pants fall down.

Loose threads symbolise all that is unfinished in the world - that which has come undone.

I want to do something about it and I need your help

Send me a loose thread, textile is best - it can be extracted or found

I will tie it up, along with others, crafting a collective solution to an old problem.

Feel free to send this request on to your family, a friend, an acquaintance, or friends of friends.

Contribute by sending your loose thread to

PO BOX 741, Newlands Estate LPO, Coburg, Victoria 3058 Australia
By May 29th 2008

Include an email contact address if you wish to be kept informed.

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Here’s the report from Aotearoa Indymedia:

We all had a wonderful time, drinking cups of tea, holding banners, and giving biscuits and short lectures on NZ-US warlinks to friendly tourists. Green MP Nandor Tanczos joined us for a cuppa briefly, who was randomly cycling past.
We got far more mainstream media attention than expected, guess the quirkiness of our action and topical nature of issue got them interested. This reflects how effective the ploughshares action was in bringing this issue up for public debate. Hopefully our attempt to bring US military base at Harewood into mix had some effect too.

We signed three cards for Sam, Adrian and Peter to express our heartfelt appreciation for their inspirational non-violent direct action,

Much love,
from one of the revolutionary craft womyn of Addington

And they managed to get some mainstream press coverage

An obsessive cross-stitcher, an expert crocheter and a quilting guru talked politics over cups of tea yesterday morning.

I reckon ten bonus points for getting nana-core into the article!

And of course my absolute maddest respect to Sam, Adi and Peter for their awesome courage in this action. Not only have they brought attention to the blatant hypocrisy of the New Zealand Government for not being a part of the invasion of Iraq, yet actively being a part of the intelligence gathering to fight this senseless war. They also succeeded in directly acting to stop the functionality of the facility. It was only a day and only a million dollars in damage which is a drop in the military industrial complex ocean. But the symbolism of their action was priceless.

Kia kaha crew, rage and solidarity.

xox

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We’ve also been chugging away with some Facebook stuff and we now have a page up for people to become supporters of the Greens. It’s a great way to be kept up to date with major campaign news. Although it’s best to also sign up through the main site so you can get info about events specific to your area.

Because of course in Aotearoa this year there will be an election! Not sure when yet, some time in November probably. So make sure you’re enrolled to vote. Especially those of us living in other lands. If you are a kiwi overseas you can vote in the election provided you have been home in the last 3 years (and meet all the other normal criteria). Check your details and update your enrolment here!

Finally check the new vid the team have made. It’s worth sending on!

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Anyhoo, I had to make sure you all saw this one because it’s a project I’ve been following for a while and it’s finally finished!

The International Fiber Collaborative project had an aim of making a giant quilt to cover an abandoned fuel station to raise awareness about our extreme dependence on oil.

And it looks amazing!

Awesome, awesome, awesome stuff. And a brilliant example of a giant community coming together in a positive constructive way to demonstrate a vision of how things could be.

My biggest congratulations to Jennifer for all the hard work putting this together. Well done sister!

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If you’re looking for some inspirational ideas for the Free Tibet Xstitch comp, you might want to check out The Colour Orange Project. This campaign has started in Europe but is quickly spreading. The campaign is to support human rights in China. The idea is to spread the colour orange as a way of supporting the various human rights campaigns around China.

From their website:

We are launching the project The Colour Orange to highlight the violations of the human rights in China on the occasion of the Olympic Games in Beijing August 2008.

The idea is both sophisticated and simple: We want to introduce The Colour Orange as a symbol of the protest against the human rights violations in China. The strict censorship can ban the use of obvious symbols of human rights, but the use of The Colour Orange cannot be banned.

So we will encourage sports people and spectators to make vast and creative use of the colour for clothing and all sorts of accessories. It can be anything, like an orange hat, camera bag, tie, pen, paper, dress, suit, bag etc. Even pealing an orange will be considered a poignant statement.

Some people in the crafting community are organising making crafty objects for people attending the games. They have set up a Flickr group for people to post pictures of their objects. People attending the games can arrange with a member of the group for a certain item, then they can post a photo of themselves and the item at the Games.

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So I was pretty amused by this competition they had at the Christchurch Wedding Expo. The brief was to design a wedding dress with the equivalent of up to 16 rolls of toilet paper. I’m not sure if this was intentional satire or not, but I thought it worked really well in that regard.

Here’s the winner

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