Heads up - Toronto Craft Alert's giving away mad prizes.

Check out all this crazy swag! And all you gotta do for a chance to win it all (including a little nest pin from yours truly) is enter the Toronto Craft Alert's Get Er Done Giveway, in which you: 1. Reveal one of your abandoned craft projects by posting a "before" picture in the contest Flickr pool (this counts as one contest entry). 2. Join the Toronto Craft Alert mailing list - which you should probably already be on anyway, ack like ya know (for another entry). 3. Post about all this giveaway bidnis on your own blog, and then share the link here (that's two more entries right there. I guess this means I just earned two entries - easy!). 4. Git off yo' ass and finally finish your long-neglected creation, and put the "after" photo in this Flickr pool (five entries, kid). 5. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done and for continuing to make craftiness a part of your life, and pray that you win. (Check out the official contest page for all the nitty gritty). Good luck, slackers.

Loved and Rummaged

Michelle, pinching a cloud.

(Stolen from Karyn's Flickr page)

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who came out to the Love and Rummage Trunk Show - it was lovely to see you again. And thank you, Karyn, for posting this and making me feel like a superstar!

Week 23: The Love and Rummage Trunk Show

Sunday, February 8, 2009

The Workroom - 1340 Queen West (near Brock)

Noon to five

See you there!

Week 22: The Love Below

Here's what I've been working on for the last couple of weeks: steamy Valentine's Day postcards made out of those cheesy, bodice-ripping inserts that come in romance novels - for sale at the Love and Rummage Trunk Show next Sunday at The Workroom.

You may be wondering what a Knittah is doing with such smut in her possession. Well, let me tell you. Back in the day when I used to work for the man (or, rather, the Woman) - i.e., a big bookstore selling crappy mass-market genre fiction - one of my greatest joys was stripping romance novels. For those of you unfamiliar with stripping, let me tell you. One of the reasons bookstores even stay in business is because booksellers are able to return books that don't sell within a year back to the publisher, for full credit. Except publishers have decided that returning cheap, poorly produced pocket books isn't worth the trouble and expense of shipping, so they just want the covers of the books as proof that they weren't sold, and the rest of the book is supposed to be "destroyed." Well, in the case of romance novels, once the cover was torn off, I was still left with a glossy, gloriously cheesy insert depicting a bountiful-bosomed maiden cradled (sometimes even carried) in the arms of her fantastically hulking Fabio - I couldn't just throw that kinda thing away, you know? So I started to keep them. Then I started to collect them. Then my co-workers started to collect them on my behalf. Four years later I had quite an impressive stash. I had serious plans for those babies (including decoupaging my entire dresser with them), but somehow over the years they went missing. Luckily I had the good sense to squirrel the top three away somewhere, and they re-surfaced about a month ago.

So here they are, for all your Valentine's Day needs. The whole project is named after Andre 3000's half of the 2003 Outkast double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below as a tribute to one of the greatest (and also, hottest) rappers ever, and also because the The Love Below totally sounds like one of those terrible euphemisms so common in romance novels - you know, things like "throbbing member" and "growing maleness." Those are for real, I couldn't make sh!t like that up. Except really I wouldn't know, because I don't read that kinda stuff.