Happy Handmade Holidays

Sigh. To be honest, we don't like Thanksgiving. This is not to say we do not adore our family or the spirit or the slight drop in temperature.

In fact, except for the food ( NOT THE CRANBERRY SAUCE MOM) we like the whole idea of Thanksgiving. It's the only holiday that doesn't involve buying a whole bunch of stuff. So this year consider taking the handmade pledge.

The handmade pledge lists the usual benefits of buying handmade:
Buying handmade makes for better gift giving,
Buying handmade is better for people,
Buying handmade is better for the environment

Of course the premise remains the same: buying stuff. Even handmade stuff is still stuff. Whether you belong to the Black Friday camp or the Buy Nothing Day camp, crafty people have yet another option that doesn't get a whole lot of press outside the Martha Stewart camp. So while the crafty peoples are always extra busy this time of year with craft shows and such, crafty people always have the option of making their own gifts.

That said, we will still be making the rounds at the craft shows around town. Last week it was Felt Club. This weekend, it will be Handmade for the Holidays over at Fairfax High.

Just not on Friday.

Old Mother Leary Left the Lantern in the Shed

And when the cow kicked it over, Marimello shrieked and said, GOOD GOD it's a hot time in the old town tonight.

OK not to pound it into your heads crafty friends, but it is still crazy here and it is a wonder that the poor little elves can type as you dear editatrix dictates. Their poor little eyes are swollen so, but you know we can't be bothered with typing ourselves with this washcloth over our eyes.

Speaking of washcloths! The Witch Fire shop is open for business and the donations are rolling in. Obviously it's time to put the red eyed elves to work photographing this luxurious stuff. So if you haven't already, roll on over to the shop on Etsy. And keep rolling back for more new stuff. The word has gone out to the fashionista friends of Marimello and we expect great things to be coming our way!

Check out the shop on the right over there and see what's happening. If you want to donate and get some FREE PRESS, head on over to the blog or give us an e-jingle.

Inferno in SoCal

Hey Crafties,
Wracking you brain for ways to help out the parched/burnt communities in Southern California? Know some one who's been evacuated. The Marimello clan alone has about 15 members evacuated from 7 homes. It's enough to make our heads spin.

And spin they did, until we settled on this idea for a charity raffle/donation site. We thought we would set up a collective to raise money for charities in SoCal. Through this new blog, Marimello is looking for donations of items that are less than $5-$10 (your cost), anything bigger will be put into a raffle. The drawing for these items will work thusly: names will come from a pool of anyone who donates, buys, or just sends in a good contribution story will be entered.
Email or leave comments if you can help!

Check it out here: witch-fire.blogspot.com

Save the World Sunday

The latest issue of Wired appeared in our mailbox recently. We do not remember subscribing, but being the voracious magazine readers we are, we did not complain.
We especially did not complain when we read Clive Thompson's article "Count on the Geeks to Rescue the Earth." It's online too so go check it out.
Thompson brought our attention to the interesting research Paul Slovic is doing on decision making. Slovic has discovered that people are more inclined to help a singular person in need over a group of people who share the same need. It's not that we are stingy, just that we're better at conceptualizing the plight of smaller groups and terrible when it comes to larger groups. Thompson's point is that this is why people like Bill Gates are good at tackling large scale third world diseases through philanthropy. Geeks are better wired to conceptualize big numbers. "We look at the huge numbers and go numb. Gates looks at them and runs the moral algorithm: Preventable death = bad; preventable death x 1 million people = 1 million times as bad."
Uh huh. Sounds simple enough. What does it have to do with crafting? Well we got to thinking about how in fiber arts particularly deal with large numbers. Cast on a sweater in the round lately? Calculate the number of threads needed for the warp and weft of your pattern? If we too conceptualize large numbers well, Slovic's research and Thompson's suggestion probably explains crafters' ability to launch large scale charity projects. It also suggests a root for the optimism with which these efforts are launched. 12 stitches = pattern; 12 stitches x 100,000 = afghan; afghan x 1 million = afghans for an entire country.
And if that's not inspiring food for a Sunday afternoon's though, well we don't know what.

Figuring the Feminine: The Great Crochet Reef

What better homage to the disappearing Great Barrier Reef than to crochet a new one? At least that's what The Institute for Figuring's (IFF) Christine and Margaret Wertheim appear to have thought four years ago when they started their project. The reef is composed of hyperbolic crocheted and for a history of hyperbolic crochet, you needn't sweep aside the brain cobwebs for high school memories of geometry class. Quite simply Euclid, father of geometry put forth five axioms: four of which were easily proved and one of which was not. This fifth axiom has to do with the nature of parallel lines and how they interact. If you have one line and then draw one point outside of it, Euclid said that only one other line could pass through that point and NOT intersect with the first line. Well there's just no way to prove that is true. Geometers tried for 2000 years and pretty much threw in the towel around the 19th Century. It turns out that infinite hyperbolic lines can pass through the point (remember that bell shaped line from geometry class?), still be straight lines, and not intersect the other straight line. The type of space defined by these lines bends away from itself and creates the sort of lettuce leafy structures we see in nature.
Um, so where's the crochet come in you ask. Well no one could build a durable model to demonstrate this idea until 1997 when Daina Tiamina, a mathematician at Cornell University finally figured out how to make a model of hyperbolic space that allows us to hold onto and tactilely explore the properties of this unique geometry. The method she used was crochet.
Voila! Somehow when you look at the image to the right, all the stuff above makes much more visual sense!
And while it's interesting is that feminine handicraft solved a very old problem in a very male-dominated field, it's more interesting that this is the mathematical method by which the Wertheim sisters are building the Great Crochet Reef.
Henri Poincaré, one of science's great philosophers once wrote that no geometry could be considered more true than any other, only more convenient. To which Daina Tiamina says that "Euclidean geometry is convenient, but that doesn’t mean it’s what nature uses." By using hyperbolic forms, the Wertheim sisters' crochet reef not only accurately represents the natural way in which the real Great Barrier Reef was created, it also hints that the the solution to the Great Barrier Reef's degradation might have a solution as revolutionary to the environmental movement as hyperbolic geometry was to mathematics.

Currently part of the reef are being exhibited at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, PA. We here in L.A. have to wait until 2008 when the whole reef is exhibited at LACE.