To Geek or not to Geek: Geek Craft

Ever tried knitting on a bus? Or in a bar? Well we did both recently and were met with raised eyebrows. Made us, and our date, feel a little geeky, but we forgot that to some football fans, crafting is something strange and unusual. Somehow these folks didn't get the memo that crafting periodically makes these leaps into the limelight of trendiness. Rather than explain it though, we sat quietly, knit, and as usual pondered.

Craft becomes a cultural fixation when posed in front of the backdrop of increasingly fast-paced, technological environments. See William Morris, and Arts & Crafts movement. And while crafting may be seen as a sort of rejection of the modern world, it can also be an awesome place to riff on modern technologies. See Make.

Lately though, this techno crafting has fallen into the dimmly defined category of "geek craft."

A couple of weeks ago Geek Sugar, one of the many facets of the Sugar empire, posted this poll to vote for the best geek craft of 2007. Oddly they only came up with six crafts, and of those five were video game related. Geek Sugar has obviously picked up on a craft trend here. Hey, even Martha Stewart made a Wii cake for the cover of Wired.

Yesterday the Globe and Mail in Canada published this article about Geek Craft, that while sort of typical in it's whole shocked-and-awed approach to geek craft, features a brief interview with Kimberly Chapman, a self proclaimed nerd.

"A significant amount of the joy I derive from my nerdy crafts is to be the first to present these juxtapositions to the world," [Kimberly Chapman] says.

She realizes her hobby may seem a bit odd to outsiders, and she's fine with that. Most people, Ms. Chapman notes, "don't watch a puppet show and mentally take apart the stitching to imagine how the puppet was made...They don't look at a structure and wonder what it would take to make a cake version.

"Nerds do those things. Nerds can't stop asking questions and mentally disassembling the world around them. Nerds wonder, and wonder is at the heart of creativity."

Read the whole article if you are interested, but nerd or not, Chapman sounds like a just another crafter who protects her patterns and likes to look at the world from 'how could I do that myself' perspective. Who wouldn't want to have their Wii and eat it too?

New Craft Calendar

We're starting up a new calendar of all things crafty for 2008. Check out that button on the right And while you're at it, feel free to email us or comment on this post with any events you might be planning or in which you might be participating.


Photo courtesy of Elle at Elle's Studio on Etsy.

Happy Merry

Whether you bought handmade or not, we are betting you bought something special. And received something special.We hope you didn't puzzle, til your puzzlers were sore. And whether you thought Christmas might not come from a store, we hope this year, you though Christmas might mean a little bit more.

Marimello's Long Winter's Nap

Well well well, look who's decided to wake up and join you crafters...our founder.

Somehow I was enjoying a cruise to Mexico and now it's the 20th. But all that sun and sand has been muted by the news that while I was gone, an amazing woman, and mother of my best friend died suddenly. Being that she was such an influential and creative lady, I've been thinking and chatting about how creativity is passed on through the people we know.

Certainly my friend's mother was an influence on me directly. She welcomed me into her home after I only just met my friend in college and I slurped up her sense of interior decorating. On the same trip, she took me to her stylist after a series of seriously bad hair cuts and taught me to trust the powers of a good hair cut again. She knit me a scarf after a fun, but cold trip to London and encouraged me to return to knitting. Which of course led to this here blog.

But more so I knew her through people she loved and who loved her. My friend talked me out of my men's undershirts and into a fetish for shoes. She weaned me off my baggy earth-tone wardrobe and taught me that good clothes open all doors. After we hadn't seen each other for a year, we showed up on the quad with the same shade of hot pink hair. She got me into blogging and inspired my writing both on and off line. Somewhere behind all of this, her mom was shopping for stylish vintage, borrowing the pink hair dye, and reading the blogs. Knowing a woman with a pink fish tail allowed me to trust my own flashy instincts and to wear them on the outside. I couldn't be more grateful to have known Judy. And I couldn't be more pleased with the thought of her keeping the eclectic fire alive in her family and friends.