Gift Guide Thingy (a little late)

I started this post before Thanksgiving, thinking I'd add a ton of fantastic gift ideas to it. Well, it didn't exactly work out that way. We've been shipping record-breaking numbers of orders, every two or three days, and it's kind of insane. Plus, we traveled to Seattle for 3 days (which was awesome!) for Urban Craft Uprising, and we're preparing for Crafty Wonderland's Super Colossal Holiday Sale this Sunday.

If you're still shopping online for holiday gifts, then maybe you should check out a few of my recommendations:

T-Shirts
Because I need to wear something, and I'm not really a fancy dresser.

Robot Juice T-shirt
This has been one of my favorite Diesel Sweeties shirts, right alongside the CSS { Rules Everything Around Me } one.

Bone Earrings
I like my slightly stretched piercings, but the steel jewelry I have is pretty boring. I found out last year that natural materials are much better for your body (bone, wood, horn), so I got some really beautiful hand-carved bone earrings, and promptly broke one of them. I'm hoping to get a new pair that are less fragile.

White Bone Earrings

 

Black Horn Earrings
These are especially cool because they have little posts so that anyone can wear them, even if you're piercings aren't stretched!

Brass Filligree

Yarn
As someone who has too much yarn, I can say that fiber whores like myself can never, truly, have too much yarn. 
 

Monarch Light - Traveling Rhinos

I've used a bunch of different hand-dyed and hand-spun yarns from Eling at Traveling Rhinos, and I've loved each one. Her color combinations always seem perfect to me.

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Septopus

I made this little amigurumi softy as a gift for a friend's new baby. I'm really a knitter and not a crocheter, but I thought I'd share this project because it proved just how creative and simple crochet is. With just a little bit of practice, you could be creating sculptural stuffed toys for your cat, baby or roommate in just a single afternoon!

I found the pattern for free through Ravelry, but you can see it here (sorry, I don't know the designer's name, beyond "Katherine"). The silly thing is that I'm terrible at counting crochet stitches, so I just kind of winged it and somehow only ended up with seven legs! So, he's actually a "septopus" instead of an octopus.

If you'd like to learn how to crochet, there are some fantastic online resources. I learned from Debbie Stoller's book, The Happy Hooker, which I highly recommend!

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At least MY yarn stash hasn't come to life

This music video makes music videos look cool again! It inspires me to create my own stop-motion animations, as well as knit nonfunctional sculptures. Hmmm....

There's also a making of the video on this blog, which is interesting to see even if you don't care about yarn.

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