The Rebel Rabbit Craft Fair is making its move to monthly, with events every fourth Sunday beginning in May (April’s edition goes down this coming Sunday, the 20th), at Hipbone Studio (1847 E Burnside). Look for all manor of creative crafts, like this oddly compelling “garden sphere” from Tah-Dah made from a bowling ball and marbles.

I have some good news for all you Blogtownies out there who love to sew. Bolt Fabric Boutique is having a store-wide sale this weekend. ALL fabric in stock is 10-50% off. Selected patterns, books, and notions will be marked down as well. The sale starts today, and runs through Sunday, April 13.

Bolt Fabric Boutique, 2136 NE Alberta, 287-2658. Get your sale shopping on: Fri 10 am - 6pm, Sat 10 am - 5 pm, and Sun 11 am - 4 pm.

Tonight, local crafter and author Susan Beal will be at the downtown Powell’s location for a celebration of her new jewelry how-to book, Bead Simple. Ms. Beal will be doing a reading and book signing, plus showing off some of the designs featured in the book. Guests will also be able to make and take home a pair of earrings.

Bead Simple is a hefty book filled with over 150 designs for earrings, necklaces, brooches, rings, charms, barrettes… even iPod cozies. The book features an informative introductory section that has a bead encyclopedia, as well as helpful jewelry making tricks and techniques that make this book non-intimidating for a beginner like myself.

Each project in the book shows precise step-by-step instructions, and also has a nifty key to let the reader know if each project is easy, moderate, advanced, takes less than an hour to make, doesn’t use a ton of materials, and costs less than $15 to make.

Bead Simple Book Event, Powell’s, 1005 W. Burnside, tonight, 7:30 pm, FREE.

To all of you crafty people out there who can knit: I hate you! I can sew and glue things together, but I can’t knit, and I have too many excuses keeping me from learning how (like having too much Deadwood to watch, for example). However, if I could knit, I would totally make these rad projects:

1. A WONDER WOMAN SWEATER! [Link] [Via]

2. A MEAT WRAP! [Link] [Via]

3. A SAW & AXE! [Link]

You can find more knitty goodness here and here.

As Amy mentioned earlier, someone left a marshmallow peep diorama outside our office door this morning. (THANKS! I think…) Anyhoo, did you know “peep dioramas” are a really big deal, and every year they have a big contest to see who can make the best one? Check out the 37 finalists of this year’s Peeps Show II. While some are just okay, a bunch are super smart and fun. Here are two of my faves!

“No Country for Old Peeps.”

“Amy Winepeep.”

I have an organization problem which is exacerbated by the number of review copies I receive in the mail every week. Now I have determined that what I need to do is use the extra books to construct a stairway to a secret clubhouse hidden somewhere in the office. (I’m not telling where.) Like this:

More photos of the ingenious book staircase here. Hat tip to the NBCC blog for that first link, which sent me down the rabbit hole to this:

Which would not look quite so good made from review copies of Vampire, Interrupted, but is still pretty cool.

Last week, Marjorie made a post about the launch of a new website called Shop Vintage Portland. I talked with the creator, Anne Weiland, about her new website, as well as her other vintage clothing blog LuLu’s Vintage, and the Artist Trading Card Swaps she and her husband, Chris Weiland, organize every month here in Portland. You can check out my interview with Miss Weiland after the jump.

Despite the questionable name, I’m quite excited about the opening of a new yarn store on SE Division (right by my house!!). At Yarnia you can design a custom blend of yarn—pick the fiber (mohair and wool), color (blue), thickness (two-ply), and amount (two pounds—yep, you pay by the mothereffin’ pound). Then proprietress Lindsey Ross busts out her steam-punk yarn machine, winds your fancy cone of yarn, and you walk out happier than stuffing your face with Turkish Delight.

Inspired by a DIY yarn shop in Montreal, Ross recounts the experience that was the inspiration for her store.

As you can probably guess, this place blew my mind. Cottons, acrylics, wools, boucle… even silk and mohair and metallics—boxes of these fibers lined the walls, filled with innumerable colors wound in uneven amounts on cones… These single filaments, I realized, piled nearly to the ceiling in boxes of like colors, were single-ply strands of yarn, waiting to be wound into what we everyday hand-knitters recognize as worsted weight commercial yarn.

Yarnia
4183 SE Division
488-0022
Grand opening on Saturday, Feb. 2

Yarnia’s Aslan. (Illustration by Brandon Reese)

So this is genuinely cool and impressive: Colors is a homebrew application for the Nintendo DS that lets you use the DS’ touchscreen as a painting surface. Since the DS’ touchscreen is pressure-sensitive, Colors treats it like a digital drawing pad one could use for PhotoShop or something—except instead of doing it on a computer, you can carry it around on in your pocket, then email and share whatever paintings you’ve created.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a whole lot of videogame-centric art, and 2Pac truly is eternal. In fact, most of the pictures up on the Colors Gallery are god-awful, like this and this and this. But Colors users have also created stuff like this:

Stunning artwork? Eh, not really. But not too shabby for being created on a cheap little machine that was originally intended to just play Mario games.

Thanks to Kotaku.

I am a bargain hunter. It’s in my blood. My mother is so into bargain hunting she receives Christmas and birthday cards from the friends she’s made on the RefundCents.com message boards. I’m not that extreme, but I do love thrift stores and getting the most bang for my buck.

I love to sew, and this hobby can get kind of expensive, but I’ve discovered a few fabric stores here in Portland that help me get the best bargains.

•KNITTIN’ KITTEN: The Knittin’ Kitten is way up on Glisan by that freaky-deaky evangelical television station, but it is so worth the trip. This place is a fabric thrift store, and like any thrift store, digging around in piles and boxes to find something amazing is the only tactic that will work here. They have a ton of 1-and-2-yard fabric remnants that range from about $1-$3. Just this weekend, I found a yard of sparkly blue vinyl for $1.50, and two yards of black corduroy for $1. They have unopened packages of vintage rick-rack and bias tape for .65 each, a huge table of inexpensive buttons, and a rack stuffed with vintage clothing patterns. This store definitely gives you the most bang for your buck.

•BOLT FABRIC BOUTIQUE: I love this fabric store. Bolt is bursting at the seams with hip fabric at reasonable prices. I wasn’t too sure about their prices until I went to Fabric Depot recently and I kept thinking to myself, “I can get better fabric than this for the same price or less at Bolt.” Plus, Bolt has a bargain case of fabrics that are 40-50% off, and a rack of fabrics by the cutting counter that are $3-4 per yard.

•JO-ANN’S FABRICS: This store is so-so. You can find some decent fabric here, but you will also find a lot of fabric that will remind you of the tacky vests your mom made for you in 1987. The thing I like about Jo-Ann’s, though, is that if you sign up for their mailing list, they will send you coupons. If you’re needing to buy an expensive cut of fabric, their 40%-off-any-item coupon comes in handy. They also have pretty good prices on plain, solid-color cottons that are a necessity to any fabric collection.

•GOODWILL: In the past few months, I’ve found some awesome cuts of vintage fabric at various Goodwill locations for really cheap. Any fabric Goodwill might have will be mixed in with the sheets and tablecloths on the linen rack.

I know there has to be more businesses in Portland that have good deals on fabric. What did I miss, dear Blogtown readers?