Etsy Pop-Up Store – recap and links!

On Saturday, Knitta hosted an Etsy pop-up store at West Elm in Houston where we met up with some of our favorite Houston-based vendors and found some new favorites as well.

Peruse these snapshots of the good times had (especially with the presence of the Eatsie Boys trailer!!), then click around our fellow vendor’s Etsy shops:

Baffin Bags — bags, wallets + storage
Beyond Her — printed textiles + more
Black Kettle Soap Company — soap + skin care
Edie’s Lab — frames + home accessories
Hello & Co. — paper goods
Horseshoe Studio — fabric prints
The Little Illustrator — illustrations + custom prints
Lloyd Gallery — sketches, watercolors + small art works
McCheek’s Mayhem — ceramics
Orange is the Sun — handmade jewelry
Plodes — home design
Silverstone Creations — handcrafted jewelry

Unfortunately, our friend Lisa Chow couldn’t make the event, but check our her prints + other art! Hopefully we’ll do it again soon… Thanks West Elm and Etsy!

meet our volunteers: The Griffin School

photo courtesy of The Griffin School

Part three of “meet our volunteers,” a series highlighting the Austin community crafters who are making A Knitted Wonderland happen.

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This semester, Magda has been an adjunct teacher at The Griffin School, a private Austin-area high school. Every Wednesday, she meets with a class of teenagers to teach the art and craft of knitting and hang out with some cool kids along the way. The group of 13 students is contributing to a total of 4 trees for the Blanton project. When they’re not knitting, they’re doing other fun stuff: for example, Ceci is teaching Magda to play eukalale.

For more photos, visit the Griffin School’s flickr page.

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A Knitted Wonderland will be on exhibit March 5-18, 2011, in the Blanton’s Faulkner Plaza. The project is in collaboration with UT’s Blanton Museum of Art, coinciding with their latest exhibit Recovering Beauty and UT’s annual open house, Explore UT. Come out to see the installation and hear Magda Sayeg, founder of Knitta, speak on Saturday, March 5th.

In the meantime, visit the project’s Facebook page and read about it over here at the Statesman.

meet our volunteers: The Girls’ School of Austin

Part two of “meet our volunteers,” a series highlighting the Austin community crafters who are making A Knitted Wonderland happen.

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Meet Clara Bogard (right), a 5th grader, Amelia Long (left), in 6th grade, and tree cozy #48 made of Fibonacci sequenced stripes. The girls are students at the Girls’ School of Austin and members of the Knitty Gritties, an after-school knitting club. As the two most advanced knitters of the group, they were given the chance to design and create this project, with only a little help from their sponsors. Amelia says her favorite thing about the project was experimenting with the colors in the sequence. She also learned how to purl! Both Clara and Amelia plan to be on site Friday for the installation, and they can’t wait to see their finished product lined up with the rest of Austin’s knit community.

The group formed in fall 2010 and has grown from 3 girls to 10 students total, ranging from 2nd to 7th grades. Sponsor Liberty Heise notes that the group seems to transcend the normal social order of a school, with special friendships reaching across age divisions. Some of the girls were already seasoned knitters (Amelia has been knitting since she was 8), but others have learned to knit since joining the group. Knitted Wonderland is the group’s first large-scale project – but just wait, Liberty warns, “We are planning to knit bomb our own campus soon after UT.”

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A Knitted Wonderland will be on exhibit March 5-18, 2011, in the Blanton’s Faulkner Plaza. The project is in collaboration with UT’s Blanton Museum of Art, coinciding with their latest exhibit Recovering Beauty and UT’s annual open house, Explore UT. Come out to see the installation and hear Magda Sayeg, founder of Knitta, speak on Saturday, March 5th.

In the meantime, visit the project’s Facebook page and read about it over here at the Statesman.

Fiesta de la P

Luckily, we had a crew of men transfer the P to the beach on a truck, under a tarp. We finished the installation just as MGMT was doing their soundcheck, so we had our own private concert before the madness of 40,000 people flocked to the beach later that day.

Bali, under wraps

Yes yes…I am supposed to stay quiet ( Me? HAHA!!!) about this until the end of October when the Insight campaign begins.  I think I can handle this. It can’t be that hard to resist telling THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD about my totally rad project in Bali!!!

In the meantime I’ll fill you in on how I spent my time when I wasn’t on a milk carton that was on a milk carton that was on 2 narrow planks of old wood…

Did I mention that I  was standing on this set-up about 25 feet off the ground… and that was only half way up the statue?

We all had some champagne the last night I was there. Frazier is an artist from Australia, who lives in Bali. Check out his work… especially the garbage based snowman. And the lovely Tang, who is a fashion designer based in Bali and Sydney. (I want her life!)

The ever rad Cisco is reason enough to play in Bali a little longer.

Goodbye Bali. It was great. You are a magical place and I hope I will return one day soon.

(Oh, and stay tuned for the unveiling….)

Me and Putu – more from Bali

This adorable scooter and side car is one of the projects I’ll be working on this week – my next vehicle attack. And this is Putu. He clearly loves his set of wheels. Check out his hand made adornments. Putu made the eagle himself! I’ll have to spiff up the chief’s head dress a bit.

Who needs a gun when you have an ax mounted to the side of your bike???? And it is freaking sharp! THIS IS GOING TO BE SO MUCH FUN!

Bali! Day One

In Bali for a project with Insight 51. The black sand beaches are sparkly!

Hello cows.

This is the beach house I’m staying at.

Thanks to Steve Gorrow for making this happen.

More photos (and installation shots!) coming soon.

Street Art Cookbook

by Benke Carlsson and Hop Louie

Dokument Press, out of Sweden, just released this book by Benke Carlsson and Hop Louie. It covers a huge array of street artists: Urban tape sculpturist Mark Jenkins, NYC’s Swoon, the UK artist Slinkachu who graffitis snails’ shells, Brazilian stencilist Alexandre Orion, our very own Knitta Please and more.

Knitta has friends in Finland

Recently, Knitta virtually met a knitting duo based in Finland. They call themselves Norsuneiti and Knittapotkyloita. They knit brilliant pieces and have placed them in Scandinavia as well as Czech Republic, Austria, and elsewhere around Europe.