Rebecca Ward: Tape Installations

I just love the bright, geometric environments created by Texas-born, Brooklyn-based artist Rebecca Ward. Her crisscrossing cathedrals and rainbow webs are composed entirely of tape. Simply fabulous!

Maptote

It seems one simply cannot have enough canvas tote bags. I use mine constantly — grocery store, day trips, miscellaneous shopping outings. They're almost like collectors items: inexpensive souvenirs from the farmers market, your favorite bookstore, or perhaps, your last vacation. Naturally I swooned when I encountered Maptote, a US company started by Rachel Rheingold (a fashion stylist) and Michael Berick (a cartographer). You can now get the playful city schematics on more than totes, including note cards and zip pouches. Such a happy meeting of functionality and locale!

Rosalind Keep: Trompe L’Oeil

London College of Fashion undergraduate Rosalind Keep is hot stuff. Her Trompe L'Oeil mini collection for the UK brand Oasis launches this week, featuring "oversized T-shirts and racerback vests with dresses, jackets, and coats drawn on top of the garment, literally 'tricking the eye'." Sadly, while Oasis is international, they have not expanded to North America. Us kids across the pond will just have fawn in vain. Cry cry cry. [via What Katie Finds, via Style Bubble]

Bio-Diversity

Three cheers for Bio-Diversity, the latest post from illustrator Christoph Niemann on his NY Times blog, Abstract City. What fun! [via MANDR, via Thought For Food, by way of Start Me Up]

Know It All No. 2 Pencil Set

The Etsy shop Paper Pasteries has got a lot of gorgeous stationary, but it was the no.2 pencil sets that really grabbed me. There's something for everyone, including the Know It All set, the Chef's set, the Make A Point set, and the Enamored set. "You're Just My Type" is begging me to gnaw dreamily around the metal end.

Seek & Speak: BluRay Sleeves

Brandon Schaefer, aka Seek&Speak, is badass. His refinement and killer style far surpass his diminutive years (he's only 25)! Seen here are some selects from his BluRay sleeve series, which sought to "distill films down to a simple image that in some way reflects the content or overall idea behind the film". These strike me as the eloquent graphic cousins of the whole "movie in 5 seconds" concept:



Be sure to take a peek at the complete sleeve series Flickr set, along with his other movie posters (ogle, drool, swoon, sigh, repeat). [via Bobby at Kitsune Noir]

Adam Rix: Business or Pleasure?

When graphic designer Adam Rix went solo from Love Creative, he needed new business cards that were creative and cheap. Solution? Vintage playing cards! "I wanted to do something more unexpected than the usual 'foil-block onto some nice stock' approach. ... I wanted my card to be a bit of a talking point when I handed it over. The only downside I've now realised is that nobody's happy with just one. I generally have to give them 3 or 4 ..." Read the complete Graphik Magazine interview. [via What Katie Finds]

Me, My Scarf, and I

Do you sew? Do you enjoy super cute functional fashion accessories? Say, ... scarves? Well then get off your duff and make one! CRAFT is offering a Singer ProFinish Serger as the grand prize for the Me, My Scarf, and I Contest. There's just a bit of time left until the November 23rd deadline. Check out the Flickr pool.

Phillip Toledano: Hope and Fear

London-born New York photographer Phillip Toledano describes his Hope and Fear project as "the external manifestation of the internal desires and paranoia that are adrift in America." Like much of his work, the series is both visually and topically unnerving, which is of course what makes it fabulous. Be sure to check out his other projects, which include Phone Sex, and America the Gift Shop. [via FFFFOUND!]

FLATMANCROOKED: Not About Vampires

I am pleased to announce the impending release of Not About Vampires: An Anthology of New Fiction Concerning Everything Else, coming at you courtesy of FLATMANCROOKED. "You won’t find an undead night-dweller anywhere inside the book, but there’s brand new work from one of America’s contemporary high horror masters, Brian Evenson, as well as tremendous new stories from some of this country’s most promising young talents. The anthology includes the top eleven stories from Flatmancrooked’s inaugural short fiction contest judged by Aimee Bender, with stories from first-prize winner Kevin Walsh, N.A. Jong, J. David Stevens, Josh Peterson, and many more, as well as brand new fiction from Shya Scanlon and Thomas McCafferty." Cover art by Kevin Best, design by yours truly.

SallyTV Project: Every Pillow Pattern in the Book!

The perennially-crafty, ever-stylish Miss Sally Kuchar is officially, wonderfully insane. After coming across Knitgrrl Shannon Okey's Pillow Book, Sally is going to create and document every pattern before her next birthday (March 18, 2010). "I'm going to make two versions of the same pillow for each project. One that follows the directions completely, and another one that is my variation (this will probably just be a different type of fabric)." Keep up with the project on her blog, SallyTV — to the best of my knowledge she's made 3 already! Three cheers for the studious goddess of craft!

The ________ Cards

The Charles & Marie soupe-for-today are The Fill In the Blank Cards — "a set of 5 cards with their bespoke envelopes to go with them, each a different color inside [red, green, pink, light grey, and dark grey] and pre scored with hundreds of little circles. Why? Because that's what makes the message!" That's right. Move over pixels, dots are back! [Thanks for the link, David]

CRAFT and Moop Bag Giveaway!

Maybe if I had a deeper purse I could be a bigger bag whore. Sadly, the CA Lotto has not amended my private art school alumni debt. But good things do happen to crafty people, and if you can articulate why you'd love to receive an incredible Moop bag and which one you fancy, CRAFT will hook you up! I mean, c'mon, any bag from the entire collection for free just for posting a comment? Hello! Show some passion, people. Check out CRAFT for details. Contest ends this Friday at noon PST.

Fred Lebain: Un printemps à New York

Have your parents also adopted the forward button as a primary means of daily connection? If so, you may have been on the receiving end of a popular chain familiarizing you with the Chinese artist Liu Bolin, who literally paints himself into his photographs. Score one for the folks. Bolin may be gimmicky, but he works damn hard at it, and everyone loves a Where's Waldo.

Enter Fred Lebain, fabulous French photographer and creative chameleon. Though Lebain's work seems less about camouflage and more about place and the lens of time. A Spring In New York is a lovely series of "images of various areas in new york city, each one of them an occasion of a 'first visit' to the location, in which he photographed and then printed in large poster format. Later, he returned to the same spots for a second visit, capturing a larger framed shot in which
he aligned the poster documenting his first visit to the current scene." [via Today and Tomorrow from DesignBoom]

The latest from We Make Words

The latest from We Make Words.

Maurizio Anzeri: Photo Embroidery

Italian-born, London-based artist Maurizio Anzeri has created a series of haunting portraits by embroidering over found photography, isolating relatable orifices (eyes and mouth) and using them as focal points for his pattern overlays. The effect is one of dreams, appearing as masks — grotesque avian ids — uniting the subjects under an outré anthropological guise. “The intimate human action of embroidery is a ritual of making and reshaping stories and the history of these people,” he says. More at Planet. [via Mandr, from Meepmeep, by way of Today and Tomorrow]