craft boxing championships: aww vs awe! round 2!

Ding ding ding!

It's time for another round of Aww vs Awe!

In the first corner, we have a new contender for Aww: upholstered tree stumps by Madelon Galland. Making the city a prettier place, one dead tree at a time. (You can learn how to upholster your own tree stumps right here.)



And the challenger for Team Awe: stacked chairs by Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo. This is why musical chairs and Jenga do not mix.



Who will win Round 2 of Aww vs Awe?
Will cuteness prevail? Or will astonishment continue its reign?

Vote now in the comments section below!

(Related: Aww vs Awe, Round 1.)

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nina katchadourian

More about books today here on Magpie & Cake. But that's not all.

It went like this, see. I came across artist Nina Katchadourian on the Quipsologies blog. They were talking about one of her pieces (the books one - more on that in a moment)... and I then I discovered her other work. And man, there's a lot of fabulous, creative stuff going on with Nina. Here are a few of my faves...

First off, Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project. She reorganizes books into groups so that their titles can be read in sequence. This would be a really funny (and time-consuming!) way to arrange your whole bookshelf. Talk about meta-narrative.

Another fun project is Talking Popcorn, in which a microphone was mounted inside a popcorn machine translates the popping sounds into Morse Code, which is then spoken aloud by a computer.

Genealogy of the Supermarket is a collection of 78 photos of the people who appear on common grocery products, like Aunt Jemima, Mr Clean, Chef Boyardee and the Sunmaid Raisins girl. They're arranged like a family tree, as if the supermarket was a big old homestead.

One of the most crafty projects - and also one of the most delicate - is the Mended Spiderweb project, in which Nina carefully patched up torn spiderwebs with red sewing thread (which the spiders later threw out!).

I love how diverse Nina's works are - but they all share a real sense of creativity and fun. And, they're just plain awesome.

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how to silkscreen (with a wolf)

The ever-fab Make blog has a great video tutorial on how to silkscreen - or screenprint, depending on what you prefer. It's hosted by two guys from Make Magazine and Etsy. (Wow, talk about a couple of jobs that I'd love to have.)

And cause they're both cool guys, they demonstrate the process by silkscreening a wolf. Rawr.

Watch the video tutorial here.

Also worth another look, Thimble.ca has a nice round-up of online silkscreening tutorials.

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the whitest boy alive

A hand-drawn video. For a lovely song. With plenty of skateboards and monsters. What more could you want?

Watch The Whitest Boy Alive's video for their song, "Golden Cage", drawn by Geoff McFetridge.



The Whitest Boy Alive is a band which includes the charming Erlend Øye from The Kings of Convenience.

Bonus: Here's a great mini-documentary about Geoff McFetridge.

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one hundred

Not crafty, really, but it sure is neat. 100 quotes, 100 numbers, 100 movies. (If you want to know what they all are, you can check out the complete list.

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bringing the rainbow inside

It's a rainy Sunday out there - and by 'rainy', I mean monsoon - so I'm getting caught up on projects around the house.

Of course, it's always more fun to do the non-essential projects first... So I rearranged my bookshelf by colour. I've posted before about people who have done this - see here and here - and I figured it was time to try it out for myself.

Here's what my bookshelf looked liked before. Quite messy and drab.



And here's what it looks like now. Much prettier, don't you think?





Arranging my books by colour has definitely cheered up my living room. And now whenever I feel like reading something green, I'll know just where to look.

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designing food

"Food is healty, tasty, and ergonomic," states this website featuring the work of Barcelona's Martí Guixé. But don't start thinking that this is about cooking or baking. Apparently, "a food designer is someone working with food, with no idea of cooking." Food-Designing features designs of restaurants, tools, and packaging, too, but I'm here to tell you about the food. Some of the designs are ingenious, some are helpful, and some are just plain fun.

I particularly like: the 7-step cookie, which instructs the eater how to bite it; the fortune cookie, which tells your fortune depending on how it breaks; the flavoured stamps (takes the old scratch 'n sniff up a notch!); the post-it chip, a little snack that's there when you need it; and the orange lollypop with a seed inside... a way to "activate sporadic and spontaneous reforestation just by splitting the seed once the candy is finished"! Sweet.

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taking it to the streets

Thanks to my hour long bus ride to work every day, I'm able to keep up with the minute goings-on of my route. Out the window, I check out new shop window displays, the church signs (my fave of recent memory: "Spirits and Eyebrows: Jesus Raised Both"), and what the person sitting in the Falun Gong protest box outside the Chinese embassy is up to (usually they're either meditating or reading).

Recently, I was very excited to see a crafty change along the route: knitted graffiti! I've read about Knitta and other groups who 'tag' city streets with knitting, but had never seen any in real life.

Tucked under the edge of the knitting were some little flyers advertising Got Craft?, billed as "a modern twist to a conventional craft fair... because mall is a four letter word".

Got Craft? is on twice this summer: Saturday May 12 & Sunday May 13 from 10am to 4pm at the Western Front at 303 East 8th Ave in Vancouver, and again on Saturday July 21 from 2pm to 8pm at the Western Front at 303 East 8th Ave The Kits House (Vine St. and W.7th Ave.) in Vancouver.

The show's brought to you by the peeps who brought knitted graffiti to Vancouver, so it's gotta be rad.

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CTRL-ALT-DELicious

I'm full of joy that someone out there has thought of and made a waffle iron that makes keyboard-shaped waffles. Does breakfast get any better than this? I think not.

The BEST are the keyboard waffle puns in the comments, from whence* I stole the "CTRL-ALT-DELicious" for the title.

- - - - - - - - - -
*Yeah, I used "whence"!

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pop-up books rock

What can I say, we're into music videos these days over here at Magpie & Cake.

But we're into paper arts, too. And books.

So what could be more awesome than Shitdisco's new music video?



Pop-up books rock.

(Via Hooked.)

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TECHknitting

With some of the clearest, easiest to comprehend diagrams out there, the author of TECHknitting aims to take the twenty-five years of knitting experience out of her mind and put it into yours, one entry at a time.
I can't imagine all the time and effort that must go into each post. Every one is a gem, from technical how tos like the continental knit stitch to frustration-avoidance posts like how to make a sweater fit to theoretical question-and-answers such as why some stitches curl and others don't. The archives are also organized nicely - you can look things up alphabetically, chronologically, or by subject. I recommend the latter to start, as even though she's only been blogging for six months, TECHknitter has built up a substantial archive of resources. Brilliant knitting site.

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colour wheeeeeeeel

Who can make the following equation work?

    School gymnasium
+ Dozens of adults running around in crayola-coloured outfits
+ Blue lamé tube-top pant-suit
= Lovely!

Answer: Feist.



And if you like that, watch this 1970s ad for the Montreal Metro:



Welcome back, 70s. We missed ya.

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Song No.6

Sweden's Norway's Ane Brun and Canada's Ron Sexsmith sing a sobby pink song about you, and it's wonderful.

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