Bring your beloved mama’s to the Edgemar Courtyard this Mother’s Day! We are offering a variety of workshops and having a free craft fair featuring some of our favorite local vendors.

Workshops include:

Mommy & Me: Embroidery and Tea, 11am-2pm
Mothers and Kids Ages 4-7
Tea bags filled with organic teas and embroidered handkerchiefs create the perfect Mother’s Day treat. Led by special guest teacher Nicole Ichtertz, your child will delight in being able to create something you both can use together. Mom will enjoy combining organic rooibos, peppermint, chai and more to create a signature blend of hand crafted teas, delicately embellished with embroidered designs.
$65 per pair, 15% discount for members

Hand Sewn Plush Cuddlephants, 12-3pm
Join local plush toy designer Ashley Long this Mother’s Day to make one of nature’s most awesome animal mamas, the elephant! Work from the instructor’s provided pattern and then customize your felt and fleece creation with sequins, ribbon and other embellishments. We’ll be using basic, easy to pick up hand sewing techniques – all crafter levels welcome!
$55 per person, 15% discount for members

Woven Palm Roses, 1-3pm
Create a matching bouquet of hand woven roses for you and mom! Join mountain man Mike Metzger as he shares his knowledge of the outdoors and teaches this traditional craft that is both versatile and beautiful. Use our selection of ribbons, trims and dried flowers to personalize your creation.
$30 per person, 15% discount

Happy Earth Day everyone (or tomorrow if you read this on thursday)! Rather than feel guilty about the ways we are wasteful today, we’d like to encourage you to take a little time to create something reusable you can feel good about. Celebrate the earth we live on and the many opportunities we have to help it! Here are a few crafts you can make today and everyday. Enjoy!

Three years ago I decided to make an Item Block pillow for my friend Devin. We were discussing the pillow and agreed that to be a proper item block, something needs to come out of it.

“Quillows” are quilts that fold into a pillow. When it’s a quilt, there’s a pocket on the back for your toesies, and when it’s a pillow the quilt is safely tucked away.

I can’t really resist pixel art. It’s just too cool. So I went a little bit crazy and decided to make a screen shot wall hanging as well. it’s about 60″ wide and 50″ tall. (Check out my little printout in the lower corner – I found a screenshot from the game and used Paint on my computer to make a map of all of the pixels.)

The bricks, bridge and axe are made up of 1/4″ pixels, and then Mario, Bowser, the fire ball, the hammers, and the lava are all 1/2″ pixels. (For the quilting nerds out there, the grey bricks and the bridge are all pieced and the lava, characters and weapons are all appliqued using Wonder Under.)

The one crucial Mario element that I couldn’t fit on the quilt was Bowser’s fireball, which was just too long to really sit happily anywhere on the quilt. So I went to Spoonflower.com, this incredible web site where you can upload images from your computer and they will print it out on fabric. I uploaded some tiny Bowser fireballs and used the fabric as the binding around the outside edge of the quilt, and as a sleeve on the back so that it can be hung on a wall.

In the process of making the screenshot wall hanging, I accidentally made a backwards Mario who was running away from Bowser, so I put him on a pillowcase with a green pipe on the back. I put the pillowcase zipper right on top of the green pipe so that you can take the pillow out of the pipe when you want to wash the pillowcase.

Whenever new roving comes in I just can’t wait to pile into it just like the scene in E.T. when he’s hiding in all them stuffed animals. A shout out to all the sheep for sharing their fur with us to be dyed, sculpted (needle felted of course) and loved. Thank you sheep!

This month – try out our button maker for free! Buttons are a great way to get your ziney messages across with a single inch or two. Try out our one inch and two and a quarter inch button maker out and make one of each size for free – don’t forget to bring your zines!

Zines are small, low budget, self-published and self-distributed publications, written by authors outside the mainstream who are motivated to share thoughts or skills with a community rather than to make money or get famous. In a word, zines are awesome. We’ll be working on our own zines are well as collaborative projects, have zine swaps and lots of examples to peruse through.

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posted in Altered Art, Blog, Events, Misc Crafts, Past, Urban Craft Pack, Zines