Results tagged “diy”

From the folks at locally run site Merriment Design, who brought you the DIY Chicago Flag Passport Cover, come these instructions on how to make some nifty napkin rings and placecards for your Thanksgiving dinner - no sewing machine required.

When Prescott emailed me yesterday to say "thanks" for pointing him in the direction of those Chicago Flag Christmas Cards on Etsy, I made sure to send him something else that just came my way: a DIY Chicago Flag Passport Cover. Although Prescott shuddered at the thought of bumbling around with swatches of fabric, I thought some of our readers might like the scoop on these free, very nicely done step-by-step instructions to create your own Chicago travel companion.

This cosmetics bag is entirely handmade, fashioned from pre-washed printed fabric of Illinois windmills.* The 10" by 6" bag is 100% cotton and machine-washable. $4.99.

Two separate arts festivals will be taking place in Wicker Park this weekend. While poking around for information, we got the distinct impression that Wicker Park is fighting hard to keep an artistic community and these types of festivals in the neighborhood, despite creeping gentrification. Come on out and support your local artists.

A new documentary is in the works to illuminate the flourishing DIY trend. Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY Art, Craft, and Design is the product of first-time filmmaker Faythe Levine, who was inspired to create the documentary after attending Chicago's Renegade Craft Fair in 2003:

       

If the hot and steamy weather, or the drizzly rain get to be too much for you at his year's indie rock fest, there's still plenty of distractions to keep you busy while wait for the next band.

We always tromp down Belmont to Paper Boy any time we need to buy someone a birthday card, because the stationary store usually has a nice little selection of cards handmade here in Chicago. We have an affinity for Chicago's DIY scene, and are complete suckers for anything fashioned by local artists.

Way back before she became Avrilized, Chicago musician Liz Phair wowed the indie music scene with her stunning full-length debut, Exile in Guyville, an alleged song-for-song response to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. Fifteen years after Exile on Guyville's release, Phair finds herself listed as one of the greatest female guitarists by Venus Zine. The Chicago-based "leading source for coverage of women in music, art, film, fashion, and DIY culture" recently released a list of their top female guitarists of all time, itself a response to Rolling Stone's 2003 list of the top 100 guitarists of all time, a list that only included two females (Joni Mitchell and Joan Jett).

Made in Chicago has been buried under snow and soot for a minute, but on a cold, wintry day such as this, we're digging it out with another homemade gem to share with all of you to help you finish out the week.

This was a good year to be a large cultural institution. If cuts in state arts funding and unstable financial markets made a dent in Chicago’s largest museums, they sure weren’t letting on. The Art Institute remained one of the city’s prime attractions, attracting hordes of frugal visitors on free Thursday nights to piece together Richard Misrach’s disorienting beach photography and William Pope.L’s naïvely charming travelogue, or to enjoy Jeff Wall’s mind-bending photography — his mid-career retrospective was the year’s most breathtaking exhibit.

Made in Chicago's taken a short hiatus, but now we're back, full of turkey and thankful for the artists and artisans in our town. Dolan Geiman grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia on his family's Christmas tree farm. Dolan started making things from an early age and exploring the Blue Ridge Mountains near his home. His work reminds us of traipsing around old barns and making tree forts back in Tennessee. Dolan and...

Flurries possible tonight, but this weekend shouldn't be too, too chilly. Which is good because there's a ton of fun stuff going on tomorrow: Paula Deen has two live shows at the Chicago Theater tomorrow. BYO sticks of butter, we're guessing. Tickets start at $45 and are still available for both the 11am and 4pm shows. Not in the mood for angioplasty? Head over to the DIY Trunk Show, at Pulaski Park auditorium. We're starting...

The last two weeks, our Made in Chicago feature, about local artists and crafters, has brought you jewelry. Now, we bring you some crafty clothes to go with that Chicago skyline necklace. Amy DeVoogd ( it's Dutch, pronounced “deh-vogued”), 42, a drifter from Boston, MA to Charlottesville, VA, has settled as a Chicagoan since 2004. Her illustrations are bright contrasts of color that are both surprisingly simple and detailed. Her work has appeared in Playgirl,...

As being "green" continues to grow in trendiness, even clothing designers are hopping on the bandwagon, offering up pieces in everything from tree fibers to our state's favorite crop, corn.

Every so often, we get an undeniable desire to craft. Inviting a few friends over, we set out with a goal of creating a clever present or fun piece of decor. However, a few hours after setting out with a lofty craft goal, our plans to create a card made from old magazines or a personalized iPod cozy are generally little more than a distant memory, replaced by a few bottles of wine and some...

Movies in the summertime. Comic book heroes? Check. Cuddly computer animation? Check. Bloated running times? Check. MOTS? SOS? Double-check. With scads of movie franchises so stale yet so expensive they give McDonald's a bad name, it's no wonder that we'd rather catch up on our reading than check out what Hollywood has deigned to fob off on us this season. (We do confess to being excited about Ocean's Thirteen however; director Steven Soderbergh always keeps...

Author Ben Tanzer

Here at Chicagoist we're all about DIY. (That's "Do It Yourself," by the way.) Chicagoist itself is DIY. Not to toot our own horn, but most of us here are unpaid volunteers whose recompense consists of the chance to share really cool stuff with you, our readers, and trigger interesting conversations (and getting jiggy with the occasional celebrity).

A+D Gallery's "Pass It On" DIY Exhibit Curators

We're gonna keep it real. We are not young or thin or rich enough to go to all of those clubs on Lake Street or anywhere else they are — we don't know where they are 'cause we just don't do that sort of thing. Our days of the potential for crazy sex and good blow in the bathroom are LOONNG over, and we never were cool enough to swing bottle service, anyway. So, the...

The DIY Trunk Show is a yearly event that brings the best of Chicago's alternative craft community together for you. Not only will you be able to get everything from handmade clothing to jewelry to art to music, but you’ll be buying it from a real live person here in Chicago who made it themselves. That beats buying mass-produced junk from some corporation. Also, remember, the holiday gift-giving season is just around the corner, so this is the perfect chance to buy a one-of-a-kind gift for that certain someone.

Tim Nordwind; Bassist, OK Go

No, we're not talking about the DIY Trunk Show. Although Chicagoist has a love/hate relationship with the "crafting a revolution" movement, we must admit that we do get excited over handmade goods, especially the affordable kind. We know that creating something by hand is time-consuming, and it's better to buy something made locally than some mass-produced crap made by a small child in Korea. We craft, too. We get it. But we often cry "bullshit!"...

Last night’s Chicago Music Commission panel on "Promoting and Marketing Music - DIY Marketing to the Public" was a back-to-basics discussion on the smartest ways to promote your band in an era when you’re competing with a million other bands. Mark Roth of Centerstage Chicago moderated a panel with Jim Kopeny of Chicagoist/Tankboy Productions, Doug LeFrak of Feisty Management and Jay Prasad of Pure Entertainment, who spoke about the successes they’ve seen in the several...

Just a reminder about our post from this weekend that you may have missed whilst you were out counting up all the girls dressed up as Rainbow Brite and all the guys dressed up as the Crocodile Hunter. Chicagoist’s Jim Kopeny, a.k.a. Tankboy, will join three other panelists at the Chicago Cultural Center tonight at 6:00 for a discussion entitled Marketing Music – Part I: DIY Reaching the Public. If you ever wanted to know...

If you’re a local musician and you’re not already taking advantage of the Musicians at Work forums offered through the Chicago Music Commission, Chicagoist recommends you start this Monday with “Marketing Music – Part I: DIY Reaching the Public.” And not just because one of our writers will be speaking there. Thanks to MySpace, podcasts and e-mail, it’s easier and less expensive than ever to market your band. Yet technology is only as good as...

We're late posting on this, since you already may have missed the fair yesterday, but here's a reminder: Get your ass over to the Renegade Craft Fair today! These are not your grandma's crafts, the fair showcases some of the coolest crafts from all over the country, including DIY knitting, jewelry, sewn items, paper goods, silkscreening, comics, zines and more! Check it out today or you'll have to wait til next year!...

A little word association. When we hear "knitting" we think "ball of knots." Hot glue gun? Burned fingers. Handsaw? Lost limbs. Chicagoist is not a crafter. But luckily, many people in Chicago are.

We just had to chuckle this morning when we saw that Red Streak decided again tell the White Sox, "Who gives a shit? World Series? World Schmeries!" and bring us the breaking news that the FDA might approve a OTC DIY HIV test. Might? Yeh, that seems like something that shouuld take priority over the Sox. We realize that not everyone's into sports and last time we thought, "Well, maybe they're appealing to the people who aren't baseball fans," but come on! It's not every day that the hometown underdog for 88 years wins baseball's world title! And we'd like to think the story of their win transcends just sports. Also, how totally predictable are the three local headlines "Believe It"? If we have to listen to that Journey song one more time we're going Van Gogh on our ears. Seriously!

Adam Kempenaar and Sam Hallgren, Cinecasters