resources « Handmade Librarian

The Slowcoast Project.

Last month I met Bristol-based designer Nick Hand. Over tea we talked about handmade creativity, and he told me how he’s been exploring and documenting the makers he meets. But it wasn’t until this recent stretch of warm days, when I got on my bicycle again for the first time in months, that I realized

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The Quilt Index.

My love for handmade material culture is in large part tied to my interest in the human histories behind objects. A digital humanities project that I’ve been spending far too much time with lately has, as one of its many virtues, a means of collecting and sharing the stories behind quilts all over the country.

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Knitting Machine Nostalgia.

I’m currently reading (and would recommend) Jonathan Coe’s The Rain Before It Falls. Thanks to this novel, I’ve now had my first literary encounter with a knitting machine. In one scene, a now-elderly woman discusses the clothes she wore in a photograph taken while she lived with country relatives to avoid the dangers of World

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Hyperbolic Dog Toys.

My dog is really into hyperbolic space. Maisie’s favorite toy these days is a little model of a pseudosphere I crocheted using the guidance found in A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space by Margaret Wertheim (and with a little extra guidance from tips found at Lion Brand). Creating crocheted mathematical models of non-Euclidean space was

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