But the article did remind me of some lovely images of traditional craftsmen by printmaker Stanley Anderson. Here are three:

Coppicing:

Chairmaking:

Basket weaving:

These are from Country Bazaar, a 1970′s book about country crafts.  (I’m not sure about copyright here – please let me know if it is an issue). You can find a few more if you google, for instance The Violin Maker, but wouldn’t it be cool if it were possible to see the whole series?

The Eye of Sauron goes off to a villian’s party!

Raggy Rat has made a couple of beautiful marine-themed puppets for Portland’s Seafest: a cuttlefish and a tompot blenny.

There are some great photos and commentary on the making process here. I love the mixing of different types of fabric, and the wool in particular reminds me of Mimi‘s use of wools. I’m looking forward to seeing photos taken at the festival, too. (And look at this cool jellyfish cake!). Thanks for letting me post your photos, Cat!

• I disliked dolls as a child, but loved teddy bears and other animal toys. My favourite was a panda I was given when I was about 4. I was fluent in Panda talk. Another favourite was a little German-made bear that I was given to keep in my pocket on the plane when my family moved from South Africa to Australia when I was seven. (I don’t think he is a Stieff bear, because I don’t remember him ever having a stud in his ear, but he is a dead-ringer for Peter Bull’s bear, Theodore, that sold for a fortune in 1995.)

• When I was little I used to save up my pocket money for 10 weeks to buy little felt mice from a tiny shop called The Acorn in the Adelaide Hills. They had tartan clothing, and you could get girl and boy mice. Later I started to make them for myself, and I had a whole family of them, all with alliterative names like Miranda Mouse. I also made them things like tiny books, bags and babies. I still have some, and I still make them occasionally. There are notes on the photo if you follow its link through to Flickr.

• When I was about 12 I went through a phase of carving rabbits in the ends of matchsticks.
• Another early foray in craft was making miniature gonks in football colours for friends at school. Gonks were a 60′s fad, essentially humpty dumpties with big hands and feet, and a fuzzy tuft of hair.

• At about the same age I started making soft toys from patterns in women’s magazines, only I often made them straight from the miniature pattern on the page, rather than scaling them up
• We have a couple of treasured crocheted blankets made by grannies in the family, but on the whole I dislike crocheted objects. Amigurumi drive me nuts. I don’t know why.
• I find it very difficult to tag people; not sure why. (I also have a telephone thing, have to push myself to telephone at times). So if any of my blogging friends would like to take up the meme and run with it, please do, and let me know in comments here.

While my foot is in a cast I’ve picked up an old knitting project, continuing knitting squares for a blanket. I’ve done about 6 new ones, and I’m up to about 42 squares.

I’ve watched a motley collection of DVDs:

Casino Royale – a complete waste of time, apart from the animation at the beginning which was great – loved the way it played with pattern and card imagery.
Happy Feet – good animation, but crap illogical storyline
Cars – hackneyed if worthy themes, but cool and inventive concepts and animation
Robots – hackneyed if worthy themes, but cool and inventive concepts and animation. Loved all the mechanical ideas.
HP: Goblet of Fire - enjoyable, but so much missing
Starskey and Hutch – thoroughly enjoyable crap – loved it, much to my surprise
Jindabyne – an uncomfortable but really good film; sustained creepiness; feminist, though that opinion might seem odd. My haunting image is of the hooked trout, about to become the mens’ trophy, powerless and taking its final slow gasps and flaps.

And motley reading? I’ve just finished re-reading all 6 of the Harry Potter books. And Bryce Courtney’s The Potato Factory which I enjoyed though it’s not great in any sense. And an old Donna Leon. Now I’m on to The Poisonwood Bible. But I expect to go back to Harry when I get my turn with the new one next week.

I’ve been phoning around the crafts shops asking if they have any large koala noses, as you do. Only one person spluttered with laughter; she gets a big tick of approval. But it turns out there is a dearth of koala noses. What can have happened?? Where can they be? Are they living it up, kicking up their heels somewhere, free at last?

Later:
I got to thinking what a strange word dirth was, and tried looking it up. There was a derth of dirths but eventually I found that its obsolete, obscure and spelt derth, making for a derth of derths, as well as dirths and koala noses. (Still later: Okay, it’s dearth. I got there in the end.)

Pasha at Project Puppet in comments below found one loafing around (thanks Pasha!), confirming my suspicions.

Fancy having to send to the US for a koala nose.

‘The swap-o-rama-rama and the computer-related stuff were equally exciting at the Maker Faire. It was precisely that they were treated equally as cool exemplars of the DIY ethic that made this juxtaposition
so interesting. It wasn’t about gender, it was about the maker impulse, and all its forms.’

— Tim O’Reilly

‘It wasn’t about gender, it was about the maker impulse, and all its forms.’

I’m a maker for the performing and theatre arts, and I appreciate this reasoning. But using the swap-o-rama-rama as an example of making Maker Faire more gender-inclusive, and describing Craft magazine as having a more ‘female spin’ seems to me to turn that statement around, because there is an underlying assumption there about what females are interested in. In a banner at the Renegade Craft Fair, Craft Magazine has the by-line ‘Hang it, Stitch it, Wear it, Light it’: the assumption is still that women are primarily interested in decoration, sewing and fashion. While that may be stereotypically true, working on that
assumption is preserving and encouraging the status quo, (and making money from it), rather than challenging it and acknowledging that there are women out there whose skills and interests within the making and
craft world go well beyond those traditional interests expressed in a modern way. I also think there is a danger of diminishing craft by defining it in this way, just when it seemed to have broken lose from being a lesser creature by being included in the broader term, make.

As an aside, I’m also watchful about the new craft movement being somewhat bound up with retro and the 50’s, and I wonder if it means some of the social attitudes about gender from that time are also being revisited. I get worried when I see apron-making contests. Many craft bloggers are women with small children, and it must be great to have the community and connection of blogging if you are a stay-at-home mother. But I wonder if it also means that craft is still largely in the realm of something a woman makes for, or as a reflection of, her
domestic world, for love or pin-money, while the kids are small. There is nothing wrong with that seen for what it is, essentially a hobby and social activity, but it might mean the new craft movement is not so new
after all.

— Hil

Yesterday Shelley wrote that O’Reilly’s company could do much to ensure that Craft attracts a good audience of men and women, and to encompass and encourage a broader less-gender-specific view of craft. My feeling is that the creation of Craft, in addition to Make, is essentially a marketing decision to diversify and increase their business domain by capitalizing on that ‘female spin’, and its therefore more likely to rely on preserving the status quo, as I said above. If it makes good business sense to divide Make and Craft in this way, I doubt Craft will go down the road that Shelley optimistically suggests.

Mimi has added three new robots to her robot family. Some are more like pillows, while others, like this guy, are fully articulated, but they are all really cool.

Alternatively, put them together with Mimi’s big men, grandmas, fat fairies and others, and I can see them all becoming part of a whole imaginary world that has its own original style and aesthetic.