Craftastic Event: Glam, Glitter & Gore, Oct. 23

We're teaming up with local artist Jennifer Cunningham to present a super-fun, seasonal art, fashion & shopping extravaganza! It will be on Saturday, Oct. 23, with a variety of activities going on throughout the day and night. However, you can see the Glam, Glitter & Gore art installation by Jennifer & a slew of other awesome resident artists at Starving Art Studios/EAT during the whole month of October.

Starting at noon, the indoor artist market, food trailers and outdoor art & craft vendors will all be open to the public. There will be family-friendly craft projects, face painting, and various other fall festival activities going on.

From 6-10pm we'll have evening programming for the adults, including a closing reception for the in-house artist exhibition, drinks, live music by Auroravore, Tai Collins & others TBD, a costume contest, photo booths & more! The main attraction will be a fabulous fashion show featuring collaborative collections by Jennifer Cunningham, Anslee Connell & Megan Summerville.

Wearable and visual art will be available for sale in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and price ranges, so come on out & support a fantastic array of local artists all in one spot! We'll also be celebrating the birthdays of Beth H. (that's me!), Beth A. and Sue Zola (Austin's acclaimed glitter art diva) with fun and fabulous surprises!

For more info, check out Jennifer's Austin Wearable Art Examiner article and the Facebook event page. Hope to see you all there!

Renegade Re-Cap: It rocked and I bought some awesome stuff!

Last weekend's utterly amazing Renegade Craft Fair (in Austin for the first time ever!) was jam packed with awesome vendors and had a huge turn out to boot! None of us knew what to expect and we were blown away with the rush on Saturday morning. The organizers told us that 1500 people came through the doors in the first hour alone!

By Sunday evening, the crowd had dwindled, we'd run out of "timber" for our "Trick Out Some Timber" craft (luckily people still loved trying the image transfer onto cardboard). Around 6pm I took the opportunity to run around the fair to do my shopping and here is what I bought:


Two heart shaped bracelets from Verameat (I love hearts... I mean Paired Hearts represent!)
And two cutie onesies from harrilu. The toaster is in homage to my pup Toast and I thought the kitten was just adorable. I also ordered a custom clutch from Jenny N. Design, can't wait to receive it! -Like this but with a different leather:

My husband came and bought:


A cool tee from KDS Clothing, and a rad Tortoise poster from Empire Press.

Our booth was rocking it too, here are a bunch of pics to prove it:

Pre-opening, I'm up on the roof to do some cleaning & decorating.

From the time the doors opened on Day 1 until they closed on Day 2, our interactive area was hoppin'!

We showed guests how to "Trick Out Some Timber" with a simple image transfer technique, & then use decoupage &/or picks from our stash of cool ribbon, trims, buttons & baubles to give it some unique flair.

Here comes the Minor Mishap Marching Band!

A steady stream of shoppers enjoyed browsing the handmade goods inside Stella's Boutique (at times it was shoulder-to-shoulder in there!), & we had our famous design-your-own pinback buttons station just outside the door.

A big "thank you" to everyone who came out! We had such a fabulous time spreading the crafty love & made lots of new friends. Can't wait for Renegade Austin 2011! {Oh yes, I think it's gonna happen!} : )

Renegade or Bust! Only 3 more days!!!

Tissue paper, pipe cleaners & faux jewels, oh my! What are we doing with all of these craftastic materials, you ask? Getting ready for the Renegade Craft Fair, of course!

Beth A & our awesome intern, Caitlin, made dozens of pretty tissue flowers to decorate our booth. I made a sign for our crafty make & take: Trick Out Some Timber! And we made some other super-cool decorations, but you'll have to come out to the show to see those! We have to save some surprises to wow you, right?

By now you've probably heard all about it, but if not, hop over to the Renegade page to get all the deets! It's happening THIS WEEKEND, and believe me, you don't want to miss it. We'll be there with Stella's Boutique (that's right: we're bringing our Airstream right into the events center!) & crafty DIY fun for you guys. There will be over 200 indie-crafters, interactive awesomeness from our friends at The Stitch Lab, Austin Craft Mafia & sooo much more! Too much handmade goodness to list here, so come on out & see for yourself!

Wood You Like To Try This?

Jen here. The girls at The WonderCraft have been hard at work getting our crafty fun project ready for The Renegade Craft Fair that is coming up just around the corner (May 15th & 16th). I think you guys will have a blast with our project.

I will share a few of the things I did for the sample I made here. One of the things we will be showing everyone at Renegade is a simple image transfer technique. It's super-easy, fun and versatile.

Now, I don't want to spoil the fun on that project so I went with a different technique for this blog post, but the results are similar. I decided to use graphite paper and transfer an image. Not as easy as it sounds. But after drawing in the missing pieces with a marker, I was pretty happy. I embellished it with some pieces I cut out of a doily, then decided to Mod Podge the whole image. Well, it smeared a bit so after fussing with it, I just went with the results and played them up. The result is a much softer look than I had originally planned, but I like it.

If you want to make your own cute wall hanging or pendant then come on down and visit us at Renegade! We'll have a ton of supplies and some great techniques to share.

We Make Stuff like Wacky Pinback Buttons and Cardboard Wallets

Strange, but true: button-making is really addictive! We just bought a button-maker for The WonderCraft & I am in love! It arrived a few days ago, just in time for the We Make Stuff event on Saturday night. We decided to offer Design-Your-Own buttons to patrons, and boy was it ever a hit!





Here are a couple of cutie pies with their buttons. They were a fun & sweet pair (unfortunately I did not get their names). There's just something really satisfying about framing a pretty patterned paper or a random magazine pic in a 1-inch button.











My fave of the night was the Drew Barrymore eye that I cut from a makeup advertisement. Bonus: the resulting eye-less photo was pretty cool in itself! although a bit creepy. It got even creepier later when I made a second button with her other eye for someone else.

I loved my Drew Barrymore Eye, but alas, she is already gone. I think I lost her at Magnolia Cafe, where the WonderCrafters & their menfolk were enjoying a late night (early morning) post-event dinner. When I arrived home and was getting ready for bed, I realized she was no longer pinned to my shirt. So if anyone sees Drew Barrymore's eye peeking up at them somewhere along S Congress, please let me know. I miss her.

We had a sweet DIY Upcycled Cardboard Wallets make & take station that was a huge hit, too. People were making the most amazing stuff!


Also, Trevor Ray Thompson was there with his fantastic photo booth setup. Fun stuff! Congrats & thanks to Candace of Electric Promotions (shown here with the awesome giant scissors she made) for throwing another smashing par-tay celebrating our local art & craftsters! See more pics from We Make Stuff in The WonderCraft's Flickr stream.

Mix & Make Crafty Hour tonight, plus We Make Stuff Saturday!

Come out tonight & make drink charms with us at Imperia! A fun way to unwind after work and unleash your creativity. $20 at the door - includes the crafting fun, plus a drink & a California roll! Imperia is downtown at 3rd & Colorado.







View our classes and sign up today!

Make a Recycled Creature with Us 9/26 at Jerry's!

On Saturday, Sept. 26th, from 12-3pm, we'll be out at Jerry's Artarama with Stella, our fabulous mobile crafting unit Airstream trailer, for a day filled with DIY fun! We'll be doing a Recycled Creatures demo where you can join in and make your own unique, earth-friendly work of art to take home, free of charge! How about an owl? Or perhaps a robot?

There will also be in-store watercolor demos by Kathleen McElwaine, tasty refreshments by NadaMoo, and student band The Rotators, led by instructor Ross Carnes of the Sri Atmananda Memorial School. This is a day of fun for the whole family, so be sure to bring out the kiddos! Best of all, admission is free. Don't miss out!

Stella's Big Debut

Handmade Nation, a super-cool documentary by Faith Levine, was screened last Sunday at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and there was a mini craft fair outside the theater. The WonderCraft was invited to participate (thanks, Sublime Stitching gals!) so we worked around the clock to get Stella, our Airstream trailer, ready. Sunday was to be her big debut, the first time the trailer was opened to the public, so we wanted her to be beautiful inside & out!

We painted, had flooring installed, Beth A & her husband built bench seating that doubles as storage, and I made curtains. It was a mad scramble to get everything done (and of course there is still a lot more that we want to do), but Stella looks radiant! Everyone seemed to be pretty impressed with her & we had a blast showing her off. We did a fun make & take project creating accessory bags from old t-shirts (shown below). The craft fair and film screenings drew a wonderful crowd - we met tons of lovely people and were inspired by all of the creativity in the air. It was a beautiful day filled with craftacular fun! [Photo at very top of post is the brilliant work of Houstonian Magda Sayeg, a.k.a. KnittaPlease, who was in attendance at the premier. All photos taken by Jen Bryan & Stephanie Nance. Thanks, ladies!]

New Calendar and Demos & Events Blog Up

Yesterday we worked on a couple of new features for our website to make it easier for you to find the classes you're looking for and keep up with all of the cool things The WonderCraft has coming your way!

First, we have a handy-dandy new calendar up on our website that lists all of our classes by date, making it super-easy for you to see what fits with your schedule. We'll be adding all of our events & demos to this calendar as well (still working on that part).

Additionally, we've created a second blog, Crafty Demos & Events from The WonderCraft, that will be used solely as our events listing. We've got a lot of creative adventures on the horizon: demonstrations at craft supply stores, "make & take" DIY projects at festivals and craft fairs, happy hour classes & contests and more! You can subscribe to the Demos & Events blog to stay in the know and meet up with us all over town. The blog feed is also available for surfing on our website, on our Demos & Events page. There will be many occasions to get discounted admission by buying advance tickets online, so subscribe today so you don't miss out!