Be sure to check out booth #54 this Saturday in Silver Spring! Elloh not only offers whimsical paintings of scenes and characters from your favorite movies and television, but also this super cute bit of overlooked history.

El says:

Four score and seven years ago—actually the Fall of 2007 I was talking to my historian and bearded brother Mike when the idea came about. I love working on themes and series (see ‘Ode to The Office’). 2008 is a big presidential year and looking at all my brothers who have some sort of facial hair (beard, goatee, early stage of mutton chops) and talking to Mike about the presidents the idea sprouted, and grew from there. (get it? ha ha. I’ll stop now.) I may possibly (99.9%) include Obama and McCain (you’ll have to go to the show to find out!) and hope to debut some items June 28th. For now (June 28th) it is all about the Presidential Facial Hair, their time to shine before the 32 other clean shaven guys try to take over.

Check out Elloh’s booth for this print on buttons, magnets, t-shirts, totes, tea towels and various sized prints. And a mini coloring book, too.

Don’t miss the show!
Saturday, June 28 from 10am-5pm
Pyramid Atlantic Art Center
8230 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, MD

You are invited to join the Craft Mutiny for a Supply Swap Happy Hour on Tuesday, June 24th from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Chloe in Adams Morgan, DC (2473 18th St NW). Drop all your unwanted arts and crafts supplies with us, have a drink, hang out and talk crafty.

The Craft Mutiny Arts and Crafts Collective is having a Supply Swap at Crafty Bastards Silver Spring on June 28th at Pyramid Atlantic. If you have left over arts and crafts supplies taking up space in your house, here is your chance to recycle them! Never got the hang of a certain craft, but still have all the supplies? Trade them in for something else. Just want to get rid of all those beads or fiber or fabric? Donate them to the swap and maybe someone else can do something with them! You will be able to recycle or rescue all kinds of things from yarn to fabric to paint to beads. Please leave house paint, toxic materials, and old clothing at home. Other than that, if you think someone can make something from it, bring it! Don’t have anything to swap? You can still pick up new-to-you-supplies crazy cheap even if you don’t donate/trade. Also plan to get in on the fun with demonstrations of Gocco printing and yarn spinning, plus zines and how-tos. Email Craft Mutiny if you have questions!

Hogmalion & Company (booth #40) wins the award for the best commercial about fetus-shaped cookies ever made.

Check out Hogmalion & Company’s twisted cool at Crafty Bastards Silver Spring on June 28th at Pyramid Atlantic.

The Craft Mutiny Arts and Crafts Collective is having a Supply Swap at Crafty Bastards Silver Spring on June 28th at Pyramid Atlantic.

If you have left over arts and crafts supplies taking up space in your house, here is your chance to recycle them! Never got the hang of a certain craft, but still have all the supplies? Trade them in for something else. Just want to get rid of all those beads or fiber or fabric? Donate them to the swap and maybe someone else can do something with them! You will be able to recycle or rescue all kinds of things from yarn to fabric to paint to beads. Please leave house paint, toxic materials, and old clothing at home. Other than that, if you think someone can make something from it, bring it! Don’t have anything to swap? You can still pick up new-to-you-supplies crazy cheap even if you don’t donate/trade. Also plan to get in on the fun with demonstrations of Gocco printing and yarn spinning, plus zines and how-tos.

While you can drop off your stuff at booth 56 the day of the fair, you are also invited to join the Mutiny for a Supply Swap Happy Hour next Tuesday, June 24th at 6:30 at Chloe in Adams Morgan, DC (2473 18th St NW). Drop all your unwanted supplies with us, have a drink, hang out and talk crafty.

The Mutiny are also looking for volunteers to help man the booth during the fair, so please email craftmutiny@gmail.com if you would like to sign up for a shift. It will be a great way to make new crafty friends!

If you read the blog, you know we love upcycling and recycling. So, it is exciting to see so many of the vendors at Crafty Bastards Silver Spring reusing materials. Ashley Pickin from Normal is Boring (booth #22) has actually found a way to use discarded balloons and balloon parts.

I asked Ashley some questions about how she started recycling balloons.

The balloon scrap recycling idea didn’t come to me overnight. I had just started to learn how to do balloon art and I was asking my balloon artist boyfriend a million questions: How do you keep them from popping? Why does mine look crooked? But the one question that I didn’t like the answer to was, “What do you do with all of these scraps and broken pieces?”

He said, “Some of them can be inflated and used for smaller parts on sculptures, I just throw the rest away.” The idea of throwing the balloons away didn’t bother me a whole lot because balloons are made from latex, a naturally biodegradable substance. But they were colorful and my pack rat instincts said “These are good for other uses.”

So I asked Ryan to start saving his scraps for me and I stared at them for weeks before I realized that they were just like any other material, they just needed to be manipulated to fit my needs. So I played with collages and patterns and the different parts of the balloon (who knew that there were different parts to a balloon?!) And one day after a ton of trial and error popped out the first few pieces. I was very excited (and I still am) and I’ve been playing with them ever since! That was only about six months ago, so I still have a lot of learning to do!

So, having a boyfriend who is a balloon artist doesn’t hurt. It is now all very clear.

Ashley starts with something that looks like this:

And this:

And makes these awesome pendants:

I also asked Ashley about latex allergies since 1 in 150 people are actually allergic to the latex that balloons are made of. She says that she coats the balloons with a sealer on the front and back so that no latex is exposed. She cautions, though, that she hasn’t employed someone with a latex allergy as a guinea pig to test these out. That would just be cruel! In the meantime, those with an allergy may be interested in her resin pieces, which have the balloon pieces embedded in them.

Ashley is a first time Crafty Bastard! You can visit her and her balloons at Crafty Bastards Silver Spring on June 28th at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (8230 Georgia Ave, Silver Spring, MD).

Tina Seamonster blogs her life and craft at I Like Seamonsters.com. She dated a magician (who didn’t, right?) in college and is lucky she didn’t try to upcycle any of the materials from his act.

You can now add your photos to our Facebook Group! Vendors, can go do it right now! And we would love it if shoppers would share their finds with us after the fair on June 28th.

Measuring tape is totally precious in my house. My kids are always stealing it to pretend it is a jump rope or a pet leash or a kite string. I am always always searching for it. I guess this is why I am drawn to these cute upcycled items made with old measuring tape.

Both the wallets ($10) and bags ($20 to $35) by Undone Clothing bring out the true beauty of measuring tape:

This tape measure bracelet ($5.98) by Ideaka is so perfectly simple.

I also like this one ($15) by CNYResinCo.

This barrette ($3.50) made in New Zealand combines measuring tape and a rhino.

Wanna make your own measuring tape masterpiece? Pick some up here for just $2.65. I am pretty sure they are much cheaper in the store (like 50 cents or something), but here you get to pick from these awesome colors.

Who knew measuring take came in so many colors?

Tina Seamonster blogs her life and craft at I Like Seamonsters.com. But you already knew that.

This month, we will be spotlighting vendors and products that you will see at Crafty Bastards Silver Spring on June 28th. You can also check out the entire vendor gallery to see more of the awesome.

There is a fine line between honest and mean. Julianna Holowka’s Mean Cards walk right on that line, leaning only over into mean country enough to make them hilarious.

Wanna let your friend know she has too many cats? Send her this card:

Know that is will never last? Slip this one in the gift bag:

Julianna says that the line was born during a particularly difficult Chicago winter with $12 worth of watercolor paints and the wreckage of a bad year. One day she wrote the sentence, “It will never get better” and posed a matching stick figure drawing. She now has a line of nearly 50 different cards, which you can check out on her website.

Check out Julianna’s vendor page to see her other products (really cool lamps and pillows!) and to find her on the vendor map.

Crafty Bastards finally has a Facebook Group and it would be rad if you would be our friend. We know you think you have more important things to do, but you totally end up on Facebook every night when you know you should be doing other things. So, just friend us already, click here and log in. You can upload photos and links and share stuff with the group.

While you are busy wasting your time, you can follow our every move on Twitter.

This just in from Japan’s Corporate News Network:

Tokyo, May 30, 2008 (Jiji Press) - Riso Kagaku Corp. said Friday that it will discontinue shipments of its Print Gocco home-use greeting card printer in June because increasing use of personal computers has shrunk its demand sharply.

Cumulative sales of the Print Gocco topped 10 million units since its launch in September 1977. Sales of the product and related supplies reached 15.2 billion yen in the year to March 1994.

But sales sank to less than one pct of the company’s group sales of 92.6 billion yen in the year to March 2008, as home-use PCs and ink-jet printers have been popular since the late 1990s.

Riso Kagaku said it will continue sales of related supplies, such as inks, for the time being.

The company mainly sells digital printers to schools and public institutions and high-speed ink-jet printers to companies.

Wasn’t it just this time last year that we thought the Gocco was saved?

Stay tuned. And keep Goccoing!

Tina Seamonster needs to learn real silk screening already.