I haven’t knitted a sweater in a long time, but my recent discovery of Danish knitwear designer Iben Høj has made it a tempting endeavor again.
Actually, I guess I’m more tempted to just run out and buy one of these impossibly delicate knit tops. They’re carried in stores in several major cities in the U.S., including New York.
The textures and drape of fabric conjure up images of spider webs and spun sugar—could a dreamier combination exist?
Think is a cafe on Mercer street with a mission: to serve up expensive drinks with a decidedly un-Starbucksian sneer and to… make you think about things.
At least recently, I must say job well done to them with the latter after spotting this flyer on one of their community boards:
It’s a flyer for flyers! And it’s so ugly! If you had a service distributing flyers, don’t you think you would at least try to make your own flyer eye-catching? So far, it appears to have caught the eyes of two people, and in both of those instances, it looks like neither person ripped off the complete telephone numbers. Hmm….
Also, if your chosen profession were to skillfully distribute flyers in New York, I’d think you would consider DISTRIBUTING your own flyers? Well, to be fair, standing out on the hot street handing out flyers is really a pain—better to find someone else to do it for you.
At last, the pattern for Luvgun has been added to the Mochimochi Shop!
This much-anticipated pattern features a hollow barrel that can be loaded with three little knitted hearts.
He’s a modern-day cupid who aims to bring love to everyone in his sight!
I am so pleased to announce that Rainycloud has hit the big time, appearing in full-color print in the current issue of Craft magazine! He’s featured in their Curio section, alongside some other amazing craft projects.
A big thank-you to everyone at Craft!
As we all know, rain can be gentle and nourishing, or nasty and mean, as New Yorkers with a shut-down subway system experienced today. Hanna of Bitter Sweet used this theme to knit up a couple of fabulously expressive Rainyclouds!
Her “bad” rain:
And her “good” rain:
I am so impressed by these!
Hannah is quite the designer herself— check out her great (and free!) knit and crochet patterns. They’re mostly food-related, and totally adorable.
Any idea what’s living under your fingernails?
This is the first “human” bit that I’ve ever knitted, and I think it came out fairly well. At least well enough to be mildly revolting.
What’s lurking below the nail will be revealed a little later.
DOMA is an Argentenian art collective after my own heart. Their toy series Acid Sweeties, released earlier this year through Kidrobot, is exactly what I would make if I made plastic collectable toys.
Here are some of my gotta-have-em’s from the series:
Sicky Barrel
Elegido
Mr Earth
Frog Guy
The toys are $7.95 for a blind box (you don’t know which you’re getting), so I recommend buying at least two at a time to avoid disappointment. (There’s always one or two in any series that you don’t really want.) But this is an overwhelmingly great collection—I almost wish it didn’t exist so that I could come up with all of them myself. Oh well.
If you happen to be in the Berlin area, check out DOMA’s work at Planet Prozess, which runs though August 19.
Lately, I’m finding economics endlessly fascinating. No, really.
Maybe it’s because I never took a course on it in college, and so never had to memorize index funds and complicated formulas, but “The Financial Page” is quickly becoming one of my favorite sections in the New Yorker magazine. (Here’s a puzzle for them: why do they publish every week when they know that everyone has at least two unread New Yorkers sitting in a pile somewhere at any given time?)
On Slate, I head straight for Tim Harford’s pieces on finding economics in action outside of Wall Street, in which he calls himself “The Undercover Economist.” So I was excited to find that he’s recently written a book with the same title, made just for mathematically-disinterested econ amateurs like me!
I just finished reading it, and I must recommend it to pretty much anyone, except maybe for econ people who already know what they’re talking about when they discuss free trade or why coffee at Starbucks costs so much while coffee growers are paid so little. Harford even almost makes a convincing case of letting economists run the world—maybe this wouldn’t be such a bad idea if people were inherently rational beings.
In any case, Harford is great at explaining the economics behind everyday human interactions, as well as basic questions about the world: why are some poor countries getting much richer than others, why is traffic so terrible in some cities, and why do I buy the most expensive drink on the menu at Starbucks? (He spends a lot of time on Starbucks, and I spend a lot of time in Starbucks.)
So kudos to Tim Harford. Thanks to him, pop economics is quickly becoming the new pop science!