new books sneak peek

i'm rushing around getting ready for a vacation trip that starts this weekend. i'll be shipping all received orders on friday (japan time) and then after i get back on june 14th.
here's a sneak peak of some of the new titles i will be carrying in my etsy shop, including these from the lovely handmade zakka series.
there are also a few new felt books that have been published recently:this is the most amazing needle-felted food i have ever seen. seriously. so detailed and perfect!
this is another new book about sewing with felt. usually i don't carry many sewing with felt books, but this one is especially lovely and has a great modern feel to the projects and designs.

i haven't posted them yet, but plan to in the next few days.
if you want one right away, you can email me directly.

my gocco treasury is on etsy's front page!

oh my god, how exciting! i feel positively giddy. AND...people are buying the items, which is good for the awesome gocco artists, but means my treasury is shrinking! here's the original treasury below.

andrea zittel

ever since i posted about the bueys bunnies, i've been thinking about my other felt hero, andrea zittel. she is a very cool young contemporary artist, and her work is very broad, often related to ideas of inhabitation.

she's done some lovely work with felt, as a very direct way to form clothing. to see more, you can go to her website, click on 'works' on the top, and A-Z Fiber Form Uniforms will take you to felt objects like the one above.

also, i learned about her new project, smockshop
from the site:

The a-z smockshop generates income for artists who’s work is either non-commercial, or not yet self sustaining. The smocks are designed by Andrea Zittel and produced by a group of smockers who reinterpret the design based on their own individual skill sets, tastes and interests. And of course as we craft the smocks we are also working on a "guide for better working".

neato.

owly shadow puppets

i just got an email from andrea of owly shadow puppets announcing that her new website is up and running.

i bought one of her puppets last year at renegade chicago, and they are great. andrea laser cuts heavy black matboard, and attaches rivets to make shadow puppets with movable joints.

she has fun designs, too: yeti, owl, sea monster, mermaid, and tooth fairy (with molar skirt, pictured above). and they are only $10, can you believe it?

etsy is a drug, a wonderful drug

this is the best thing ever. from etsyian das kaninchen (which means the bunny, in german), the bueys bunny! i love it so much i can hardly stand it. for those of you without a dorky art major past like me, joseph bueys was an early conceptual/installation artist. he constructed a whole imagined narrative history for himself about crashing his airplane and being saved by being wrapped in fat and felt. which lead to his use of heavy felt in many of his works. so, he's sort of a felt hero, to me at least.
das kaninchen has made this bueys bunny in a clever comment on buey's performance piece 'how to explain pictures to a head hare,' and turns the inherent elitism of his ideas upside down as a crafted toy that can be drooled on.
she is one smart cookie. she also has fibonacci bunnies. sweet.

no sweat apparel

since i finally got around to using my print gocco to print on fabric and felt, i sort of want to print on everything! back in college when i studied printmaking for a year, i loved everything about the process. i love the gocco too, of course, but the process is so different, it feels like its own media. anyway, now that i am always thinking about what i can print on, i started to look into what kind of blank clothing is available. american apparel has been very successful with their rhetoric of made-in-the-usa...but their founder is widely known to be a huge skeeze-ball, misogynist, union-breaker, and basically a big jerk.

a better option is no sweat apparel, who uses unionized labor to make all of their products. they have organic tees made in bethlehem, which also provides a rare source of labor for local residents. no organic onesies yet, but i received two (!) prompt and person responses to my web-based inquiry. they are an awesome company, support them if you have a chance!