If you’re in the Boston area, you probably know about the South End Open Market. While wandering among the many brightly colored stalls this weekend, I came upon a booth sporting handfuls of strikingly beautiful beaded jewelry. Since my jewelry radar is always on, I zeroed in on them. Up close, they were even more remarkable. Made out of rolled up magazine paper, the beads had none of the usual “country kitchen” paper beads usually suggest. The woman behind the table could see the saliva dripping from the corners of my mouth. “They are made by women in Uganda. All the proceeds go to helping the families in the Acholi Quarter,” she told me. These wonderful beads are not just a fashion statement, they are a powerful message of hope for a community that has been displaced by war. Visit www.projecthavehope.org to see more. There are so many ways to help. You can host a bead party with your friends (if you’re local), you can donate money to help send children to school, and soon the online shop will be up and this will be one place you can shop guilt free!

Hi guys. I’m sorry, things have been really busy for me recently. My blogs are going to have to be a lil’ bit short. Check out this awesome handbag tutorial from Kristin La Flamme. This would totally make a bitchin’ present for all your best buds. Well, that’s all I have time for, gotta dash!

Visual art consumers and creators alike will get a kick out of ourstage.com. Our Stage is a forum for indie bands and film makers to take the products of their creative genius directly to the audience. Music videos and movies are posted on Our Stage and its up to the viewing public to judge the top contenders. Then, at the end of the month, fans send text message votes of who are their favorites. Those votes decide who is the top dog. Its a great place to go to see new talent and hear an electic mix of music. And obviously, if you are an artist its a good way to get your stuff seen and heard without going bankrupt. Check out this cartoon below, one of my favorites so far. Greek gods working at a fast food joint. Hilarious.

Hi guys. I’m going to keep this short and sweet today. Check out this selection of Knitting for Pyschos at slightlywarped.com. It is freaking amazing. I especially love the knitted streams of blood. Lots of people make sweaters. I like this creepy and off-beat take on something that’s usually considered innocuous. Check out my faves below.

Take a look at that empty soft drink bottle in your trash? Is it art? Most of us would be inclined to reply “no.” Well mulitply that one bottle by two million. How about now? Seattle artist, Chris Jordan, is taking a look at the numbers in his new series, Running Numbers, An American Self-Portrait. In this series of photographs, Jordan puts our American lifestyle under the microscope. He shows us through a snap shot in time, just how much waste we continuously create. Seen from a far, his pieces look abstract. Take a closer look, and the statistics he’s illustrating are horrifying. See “Plastic Bottles” below to get a feel for it (click on the images to see a larger version) .   This piece depicts two million empty plastic bottles, the number used every five minutes in the United States. Far from desolate and hopeless, though, Jordan’s intention is to present (in his own words) “images representing these quantities” so that they “might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.” This certainly is a call to action on our part. We can all help to change the statistics.

Hi Cats and Kittens. It’s good to be back. Had myself a little vacay last week and, as we always say, I’m now looking for a vacation from my vacation (yuck, yuck). So, since I’m a little bleary eyed and disoriented, I thought today might be a good day for a short blog. Here’s a fun site that could be useful for a bunch of different projects, the very least of which could be making awesome stickers. It’s called the Warning Label Generator and it does as the name implies, it lets you generate your own warning label. Check out this sweet design I pulled together. This is just one of many, I’ve been making these all week.

Yesterday’s blog was about a free trip to a museum, today’s blog is about a free concert on your PC. Pretty soon you’re going to have a whole weekend’s worth of free entertainment (or a whole work day’s worth. Tee hee). Stolenmixtape.com is your stop for music goodness. You can hear music from new, up-and-coming artists– all the songs are constantly streaming and many of them are available free to download. Plus, this looks to be a great tool for all you struggling artists out there. Membership is free and there’s plenty of outlets to reach your potential fan base. Besides having your music centrally located, you can also create music videos on YouTube and link them to your band profile and Stolen Mix Tape provides you with “Fan Club”a handy online mass email feature that reaches anyone who has asked for band updates. There’s also a blog option and an option for fans to post your songs on their Facebook page and embed your mp3 player (which hosts a classy band photo) into their websites. The mp3 player works best w/Myspace, we had a hell of a time getting it to work on our WordPress blog. But, when we cut and pasted the code into our Myspace page, saved, the code changed. We then cut and pasted the new Myspace code, it worked! We call that the “Myspace work-around.” See an example of this technology in action below with Anvil Chorus. I am really enjoying the lead singer’s breathy voice!

Hello art lovers! Don’t you just relish a rainy day spent in an art museum; the quiet, the inspiration, the peaceful feeling? Plus you get to act all high-brow and cultured. “Look at me, I’m enjoying fine art.” The only draw back? It’s getting more and more expensive these days to visit museums and galleries. What do you do when your pockets are empty but you are craving a little art? Start your own gallery, through the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco’s “My Gallery” function. Create a free account for yourself and then sift through the thousands of photos of great pieces from around the world. Place your favorites in you’re own “gallery” and use the zoom functions to get more up close and personal then you ever could with museum security watching. And while you’re over there, check out the Pack Rat Favorites gallery (peep a smattering of our favs below) . Fine art in the comfort of your own home, at no expense to you? BAM! In your face, expensive past-time!

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Well, technology has bested me yet again. I wrote today’s blog out, all nice and neat, and then some how managed to lose the whole thing when I went to add photos. Oh well. I will not let technology win. It may be smarter, but I am more stubborn. What I wanted to tell you about is this great online charity, headhuggers.org. Run by head honcho (yes, pun intended) Sue Thompson, this site is dedicated to creating and distributing caps to people in need. This all started when Sue went to lunch with a friend of hers who was battling cancer and as a result of her chemotherapy had lost her hair. The woman was forced to wear a baseball cap to keep her head warm and this just seemed like insult added on to injury, that this woman would have to deal with being cold on top of everything else. So Sue started Head Huggers in order to help people with hair loss due to chemotherapy, brain surgery, burn wounds, and more. The mission of these hats, according to Head Huggers brochure, is to provide people in need with warmth, comfort and dignity. Sue has been at it some time now, since December 2001 and she is always looking for more volunteers. If you knit, crochet, or sew there are patterns available on the website for the caps, and there are also copyrighted patterns available if you contact Sue directly. She loves cap donations, but what she really seems to need right now is help distributing. You can help by starting up your own local chapter of Head Huggers and donating your hand crafted caps to your local oncologist offices and chemotherapy clinics. Sue has had a good amount of success so far. She’s delivered between 5,000 to 6,000 caps in 19 different states since the project began in 2001. But as always, she needs help to keep it going. So use your wonderful crafting skills to send someone a long distance hug.

Here’s another blog for your bookmarks. Fun Forever provides its readers with a bevy of fun, out of the ordinary merchandise for us to fawn over and possibly buy. The nice thing about this blog is that there’s not a particular rhyme or reason to the objects they feature, as long as they are unusual they fit the bill. They comb through the detritus out there so we don’t have to. Not necessarily wallet friendly, but fun to look at. Peruse the archives for some serious inspiration. See some examples of the treasure they’ve scavanged below (from left to right, barcode rings, pie graph cakes, cassette tape wallets, and snap out dinnerware).