an old fashioned barter

One of the things we love most about the growing DIY scene/mentality is its good old fashioned barter system!  There is something fantastically primal about two people bartering with what they have made with their own two hands.   A simple & timeless system that leaves all involved happy! Recently, benny and I did a fantastic trade with Amber over at Bolla Soaps by BSoaps for a few of our recycled fleece shawls.  Amber, who lovingly hand makes bath products using 85% Certified Organic ingredients (the highest percentage possible in soap production) with no artificial additives, sent us these amazing anxiety relief bath salts and a cedar citrus sage bar soap...check em out!

a little love makin'

To help you get ready for this weekend's love ridden holiday, benny and I will be sharing some crafty love with you all throughout the week!  Let's start things off with some Candy Heart Tea Bags!!

So invite your "hot momma" over for a cup of tea in this rainy weather.  We are sure they will find you irresistible!! How tos after the jump...

Step 1:  gather supplies

Not much is needed really, most of which you probably already have lying about.  Things to get...glue (any kind really depending on the material you plan on gluing here), scissors, card stock, bagged tea and any needed markers/pens/paints.

Step 2:  cut out hearts

First, we need to create our hearts for the end of the tea bags.  To do this cut out a template heart (make this one a real good one it is what all your hearts will look like) and then trace it multiple times onto your card stock.  You will need two hearts for every bag of tea.

Helpful Hint:  A good trick for cutting out a template that is symmetrical is to fold the card stock in half and then cut out half a heart with the folded edge acting as the middle divider of the heart.

Step 3: decorate hearts

Once the hearts are cut, it's time to color and decorate them, making them look more like candy hearts. We used spray paint as a quick and easy way to color the hearts to our liking.  But you can color the hearts however you want with markers, paint, crayons, anything really!

And now for the very best part of this craft!!  The part where you get to bring all your witty genius to the table, coming up with hilarious saying for your intended valentine.  Although we have our talents, Kelly thought we were a bit lacking in the creative writing department, so we enlisted the help of our friends.  They helped us to brainstorm a great little list of tea related love sayings, for your pleasure of course!

10 tea-tastic love sayings...
"U warm my heart", "steaming 4 you", "chai love U", "UR my sweetea", "steep in love", "honey 4 my honey", "boiling hot", "berry nice", "2 hot 2 touch", and "stir it up"

Step 4:  gluing!

The next step is just putting all the pieces together.  Take your glue (we used our trusty hot glue gun for this one) and bagged tea, remove the small paper square at the tip of the tea's string and glue a pair of your hearts together, sandwhich the end of the string between the two hearts. Once the glue sets you have yourself a custom tea bag!!

Show us what hilarious sayings and creative designs you come up with.  We would love to post them!!

Happy Turkey Day!

Happy Thanksgiving to all our awesome friends out there!   benny & I hope you all have a fabulously filling meal with those you want to be with most!!  And just in case the party needs some decorations or just some crafting fun, we have compiled a few awesome turkey crafting templates for you to enjoy...

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="479" caption="turkey name cards for the table!"][/caption]

thanks!

We had an absolute blast at indie mart and the stencil party!  Thank you to all that came and sprayed a little with us.  You all really helped to make this one of our best parties yet.  Here are a few pictures of the festivities by the always awesome Christopher Bennett...Enjoy!

love for Neil Young

We are heading back to Los Angeles to pay tribute to one of our favorite musicians and we want you to join us! On Friday, November 20th our friends over at When You Awake will be taking over theBootleg Theater for an evening to celebrate the songs of Neil Young and to support the Children’s Music Fund, a local non-profit organization that provides musical instruments and Music Therapy to children with chronic and life altering illness.

The night will feature performances of Neil Young songs by Delta Spirit, Jason Simon of Dead Meadow, Ferraby Lionheart, The Parson Redheads, Leslie Stevens of Leslie and the Badgers, The Chapin Sisters, Family of the Year, Justin Gordon, Restavrant, Shakey Graves and the Dark Horse House Band featuring Andy Creighton (The World Record/Parson Red Heads), Brian Whelan (The Broken West), Josh Charney (Le Switch), John Hoskinson, Dan Iead (The Broken West) and Rob Douglas.

Plus Kelly will be providing music inspired crafts!!  Lastly there will be DJ sets by Turquoise Wisdom (who made those amazing Bootcut ClassicsMixtapes for us last month). Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 at the door and you can buy them here.

When:  Friday November 20th  9pm
Where: Bootleg Theater 2220 beverly blvd, los angeles
Cost: $10 in advance / $12 at the door (18+)

Get a little crafty with good people, good music, for a good cause!

The Bazaar

Don't forget, saturday is the day Pretty Penny and the Parlour Gallery present the Craft Bazaar!!  We are soo excited to be participating and can't wait to see all your smiling faces tomorrow.  And to make things even more enticing we kindly donated one of our one-of-a-kind beer cozies to the bazaar's one dollar raffle!

So come to shop or come to win the raffle either way we would love you to be there!



When:  Saturday!!
Where: Pretty Penny  5488 college ave, oakland

Participating Artists:
Wonderwear , bennykelly , Crooked Sister , It's Scrap , Queen of Hearts Apparel , Volta Press , kittinhawk , Pollyannacowgirl , Salvaged Beauty , Abeo Bestia Design , BirdversusBird Design

one dollar RAFFLE!
we will be having a raffle where you can win all these awesome prizes...
$25 gift certificate from SLASH DENIM
$25 gift certificate from VOLTA PRESS
custom made beer cozy by BENNYKELLY
fabric flower hair piece by CROOKED SISTER
leather earrings by IT'S SCRAP
handmade coin purse by BIRDVERSUSBIRD
Handmade brooch by SALVAGED BEAUTY

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="298" caption="you could win this at the raffle!"][/caption]

recycled button coasters

Buttons are something kelly and I just seem to gather, from extras that come with new jackets/pants to random garage sale finds. We have always wanted to use them for some form of craftiness but could never quite figure it out.  Then yesterday it just hit us...how cool would it be to create a cup coaster out of old buttons woven together?

These coasters are the perfect gift for a friend's birthday, father's day (which is just around the corner) or just to add a little handmade touch to your home!  So start scouring for old buttons and get to craftin'! All the how tos after the jump...

It was a day full of spray paint!

We have had our hands in spray paint and fabric all day and couldn't be more excited!  Today benny and I worked feverishly on some new renewed styles for your shopping pleasure at this weekend's craft show.  Since niether of us can seem to keep our excitement to ourselves, we had to break out the camera and bring you a few preview snaps.  Enjoy!

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="490" caption="this one's organic!!"][/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="490" caption="we are all about the oversized cardigan this summer!"][/caption]

Papergirl 3

benny and I are huge fans of random gifting, so when we ran across Papergirl's project we fell in love with the concept!  Papergirl is a project that barrows the style of traditional paper boys, by distributing rolled paper artwork by bicycle to random people walking the streets of Berlin!  Each roll handed out contains multiple pieces of art that has been collected (people sending in whatever art they choose to share) over the last year.

It is heartwarming to see this project spread art in a way that honestly is the most gratifying way possible, as there in nothing better than random gifting to make a person feel loved!  Below are some photos of the event and be sure to check out the sweet video papergirl made, documenting all the love!

Swine Flu = Street Art

As many in Mexico take the extra precotion of wearing surgical masks to prevent the spread of the Swine Flu, we are seeing creativity blosoom from these scared masses!  Check out these awesome photo from telegraph.co.uk showing people sporting decorated face masks bringing a little beauty to a fearful situation!

TOMORROW!! TOMORROW!! TOMORROW!!!

can you tell we are excited?

Only 3 left to gather up those swappables..

we just hit up goodwill yesterday to pick up some extra goodies for the clothing swap!  we can't wait to swap and stencil with you all!

Chruch of Craft

We are loving this new movement and we just had to let you in on the awesomeness that is the Church of Craft!  The church is a collective of people coming together to create an environment where any and all acts of creation have value and simple satisfaction.  The Church of Craft maintains no dogma or doctrine beyond what every member believes for themselves.

These churches have begun popped up throughout the US, Canada and now the UK!  We are lucky to have one of these great churches locally meeting in the always crafty Rock Paper Scissors Collective!  This month's Sunday School will be teaching embroidery basics on refurbished and recycled fabrics.  Come and spread a little crafty goodwill!



When: Sunday, April 19th, 12-5pm (always the 3rd Sunday)

Sunday School from 12pm - 1pm

Craft On from 1pm - 5pm  (craft whatever you like, open house style)

Where: RPS Collective 2278 Telegraph Ave, Oakland

What to bring for Sunday School: Embroidery Basics
Needles, thread and fabric scraps will be available for use in the class. Bring clothing or household items (such as pillowcases or napkins) to begin or discuss an embroidery embellishment project now! OR use the fabric scraps to master some of the basic stitches. A hoop and a highlighter is helpful but not required.

Recycled Magnets!

Now that Earth Day and Mother's Day are just around the corner we thought we should bring you some nifty ways to use recycled goods for a crafty gift!  Besides, what is more fun then gluing stuff together?

Benny and I are reluctant to throw out anything. So when we first sat down to decide what gifts to create, we really wanted to use up some of our stock piles.  Our first thought was of our growing collection of used spray tips from our spray paints.  They have a nice multicolor quality that we love and we have a ton of them!  So after a little deliberation we settled on a gift that is simple, quick and totally customizable....RECYCLED MAGNETS!

All the how tos after the jump...

Save The Date...Earth Love & Crafts!

Its time to show our Earth Love once again!  We will be celebrating Earth Day with another fantastic craft party at Pretty Penny! This year's party is even better with an awesome clothing swap, then stenciling and crafting (sweetening it up a bit) all while listening to live music and digging on the free juice.

So mark your calendars with a huge red X and starting gathering your old clothes to trade and/or redecorate! We will have tons of stencils by benny, an ungodly amount of spray paint, random used buttons, and recycled random goodies to glue. We would love to see you craft up some earth love!!

When:  Sunday April 26th  2pm - 6pm

Where:  Pretty Penny 5488 college, Oakland

...no need to bring clothes to participate, you can just show up, as we will provide some clothing for the swap. We are asking for a $2 dollar donation if you don't bring swappables but still want to craft some Earth Love.

End your monday with a little craftin'...etsy style

We all need a good craft night every now and again. Well for all on the east side of things (New York) that feel that inexplicable need to craft regularly, check out etsy lab's monday Craft Night! Craft Night is a wonderful opportunity to not only make something awesome but learn new crafts and meet new people!!



Tonight is open craft night, so bring your most recent work in progress or start a new project (if your just so good that you actually finish one project before moving onto another...). Etsy is always looking for more craft tutorials! If you would like to share an idea or host a craft night just email labs@etsy.com with the subject line "craft night ideas".

When: Tonight & every monday night

Where:  Etsy Labs 325 gold st,  brooklyn 11201

Homemade Cardstock!

Kelly and I were recently brainstorming on ways to incorporate more recycled products in the overall makeup of our line, while cutting costs everywhere we can (usually these two ideas don't go hand in hand...).  In our brainstorming process we decided to do a housewide craft supply/material inventory to see what we already had.  We ran around the house gathering anything and everything that could be used to create something, which rules out very little.  Once we gathered our overwhelming pile, we soon realized we had an ungodly amount of old paper bags from all the different sorts of shopping we do.

Looking at all these bags, we just had to figure a way to use them.  One of our biggest cost here at bennykelly is cardstock.  We use it not only for all our tags and marketing fliers, but also as stencil paper.  And as of recently we've been having difficulty finding cost effective cardstock made from 100% recycled paper.  So to end our paper woos and bring more sustainability to our line, we decided to create some HOMEMADE CARDSTOCK!!

Make your own cardstock...all the how tos after the jump!

show & tell: WhatTheCraft

WhatTheCraft.com is the ultimate resource guide for the DIY fashion obsessed!  Started in 2005 by an aspiring fashion designer named Alexis, this site is a forum for fashion tutorials, resources and promotion!  One of the reasons we love WhatTheCraft is their great selection of sewing and craft tutorials, useful for the beginner to the advanced.  You can also find guides to learn what is needed to find success in selling your designs.  The site even has a sewing machine troubleshooting guide and reviews of select sewing machines/accessories!!  What crafter would not find that useful?

Stop on by the site...share a tutorial, learn a new pleating technique, or show off  your own creations in one of WhatTheCraft's frequent contests!  You might even get the itch to bookmark this one.  We did!!

Custom Postcards

Is there anything more exciting then getting physical mail?  We don't think so!  Benny and I are still avid users of the grand old postal service for more than just packages!  We just love send letters and postcards as a means of keeping in touch with our friends.  Why not just email you ask?  Although emailing is much more efficient, there is something about taking that extra effort to handwrite a message and pick out a postcard that makes the overall interact so much more fun (and generally more appreciated)!

We want nothing more then to spread our postal passion, so we put our crafty skills to work and created this simple tutorial on how to make your own custom postcards.  So break out the old address book that been gathering dust all these years and go buy some stamps!

All the how tos after the jump..

Craft Zine says farewell to print

We heard some extremely sad news the other day...Issue 10 of Craft Zine (the latest issue) will be the last issue in print.  When we heard, our hearts just sunk.  Another little guy having to make tough choices amid our shitty economic times.  Craft will continue to write their fantastic zine, but will now be available in a digital format.  As digital zine trend grows more and more, we are excited (in a bittersweet way) to see Craft join the gang.  But we will thoroughly miss having all those fantastic tutorials actually tangible and touchable.

check out the offical announcement on the craftzine blog for details from the source.