Crochet Workshop

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Shoppe on Sunday for Jessica Polka's crochet workshop! We had such a great time!

Jessica's show, Figure Legend, features new embroidered works and will be up until March 2nd. Works will be available for purchase online by the end of the week, and stay tuned for more photos! In the meantime, click here to see images of the installation and Sunday's workshop.

Braille is beautiful!

Over the years, I seem to have accidentally been amassing a small collection of braille-related ephemera. I'm not sure when it started...perhaps when Lauren and I were curating a show in Venice and one of the artists had this wonderfully clever piece with a big message in braille that read, "Non toccare, pericolo di morte." Haha, get it? Anyway...so I've been picking up things here and there...A Rolling Stone magazine, some bowls (ashtrays?), a little wooden braille "practice box", a notebook (from Rare Device). And then last year I noticed Braille popping up EVERYWHERE: braille graffiti, braille tattoos, braille wallcoverings, braille maps...I LOVE it!

whoops!

I was browsing around on Google Books, and came across this lovely little mishap. I've screwed up my share of scan jobs, but they never look this pretty.

Finished!

This weekend I finally finished the sweater I've been working on over the past year. After much head scratching, ripping out and re-knitting, I ended up with this turtleneck that I am growing to like although the pattern was definitely for a boat neck sweater. I'm not sure what happened, but here's what I ended up with!

The World's Largest!

I came across these images of the World's Largest Ball of Twine while I was searching around online just now, and they reminded me how much I love roadside attractions! We have a few ideas floating around for some spring and summer roadtrips, which include visits to state parks and definitely a few "world's largest" attractions. Can't wait!

Decorator Birds

We were watching David Attenborough's special on Birds of Paradise the other night, and were blown away by the segment on Bowerbirds. (Watch the video! It's amazing!) The male Bower Birds, who are native to New Guinea and Australia, create amazing habitats out of sticks and twigs ("bowers"), which they decorate with colorful findings from the forest in order to attract a mate. Acorns, berries, leaves, beetle shells... all perfectly arranged by color as any sophisticated decorator would do. Pretty impressive stuff.

New Favorite Item!

Yay!!! Charley and Todd's book is finally in the Shoppe!! We're so thrilled and excited and honored! If you're in the neighborhood you've got to come check it out. We'd offer it online, but the thing weighs a ton and we couldn't possibly do that to our delivery folks.

Here & There

I was out running a bunch of errands for the magazine today, and on my way to the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, I stumbled across...
and
which totally made me think of

and
and how much I love the work of Wayne White.

John G. Design

Our good friend and super talented graphic designer John Giordani just launched his new website, and it's amazing! His areas of expertise include web design, animation, print and illustration, all in a bold, clean style that fits in right next to some of our favorite designers/illustrators from the 60's. Go John! Check out his animated, interactive and ultra cute site here. You'll love it!

Antony Hall Cards

The other day we found ourselves in North Beach, so we made sure to stop by one of our favorite stores in the neighborhood, Eden & Eden. While we were there, we picked up these two beautiful silkscreened greeting cards based on folk-inspired paper cutout designs, which I am now obsessed with! They are by a British artist named Antony Hall, and there appear to be six designs in the collection, each one available in multiple colors. It was hard to narrow it down to only two! Since they are fairly large in size, (6" x 8") I have a feeling these are going to end up in frames rather than in the mail. Visit his site to see more!

Smarts & Crafts Makeover!

Welcome to new and improved Smarts & Crafts! Our lovely friend Christine Craven has been busy designing an entirely new site for us, complete with a music player so you can hear what tunes we've been listening to recently, a pinboard that shows all our current inspirations, and a "stuff we make" section that has images of all the fun crafty projects we've been working on. We love it!!

Have fun clicking around!

Oh, and ps: for those of you who subscribe to our blog via an RSS feed, please visit: www.smartsandcrafts.com to check out all the fun new stuff.

We Heart Museums

Now that we have made it through our first holiday season at the Shoppe, we are looking forward to taking the occasional day off to go museum hopping around town. There are so many good shows going on right now that we can't wait to see! Here are a couple:

The Art and Flair of Mary Blair at the Cartoon Museum.


Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart at SF MOMA.


The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson, at the De Young.

American Sampler: Corita Kent, at the USF Thacher Gallery.

We Made a Movie!

For today's DIY Wednesday post over at Design*Sponge, we decided to whip up a little movie. It was delicious fun to make. Hope you enjoy it!

Look Who's Here!

Yay! Crispin Hellion Glover is in town! He'll be screening his new film "It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE." at the gorgeous Castro theater for the next 3 evenings. Each screening will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing. Oh boy, what a treat! We love that freekin' guy! Check out this great clip from one of our many, many, many favorite Crispin films, "Rubin and Ed". And yes, when we were in college we named our cat Simon, after the cat starring in the clip above. And yes, he too could eat a WHOLE WATERMELON!

Calling all crafters!

Check out this clip on You Tube! Yep, that's our friend Todd here in the Shoppe, asking you to send in clips of your favorite holiday crafts and DIY decor. He'll pick his favorites and they'll be posted on the You Tube homepage, so set up your video cameras and start crafting!!

Blink and you'll miss it, but....

How to be rustic chic at home

We were on The Today Show this morning during their "Rustic Chic" roundup! Well, we weren't actually on the show, but they did mention our porcelain mushrooms, and logvases. Hooray!
(Warning: Don't be scared off by the crazy commercial intro....)

Art opening next Friday night!

Please join us at the Shoppe next Friday evening as we celebrate the opening of "The Small Stakes: A Year in Posters". We are huge fans of Jason Munn's work, and can't wait to see his lovely posters hanging in the gallery!

The Small Stakes: A Year in Posters
Opening Reception- Friday, December 7th, 6-9pm.
At The Curiosity Shoppe, 855 Valencia Street in San Francisco

Hope to see you there!

It's that time of year again....

Here are SOME of the boxes we shipped out yesterday- people aren't joking around with their holiday shopping! Please bear with us as we try our hardest to keep merchandise in stock and update the website, and thank you for shopping!

Love this painting

This is the image I have set on my computer desktop- it's a painting by Charley Harper, but I'm not sure of the title or the year. When we were going through his archive a few years ago I fell in love with it, and it's still one of my favorites. Just wanted to share it with everyone!

Happy Thanksgiving? Yes, Happy Thanksgiving.

I hope you are all having a nice, relaxing holiday weekend! We haven't had a day off since who knows when, so we promised ourselves one full day of sleeping in and staying in our pajamas watching movies. Well, our plans were foiled when we were woken up by a phone call from our alarm company at 6 am...

It turns out we had an attempted robbery at the Shoppe yesterday morning. Grrrrrrr!!! Someone smashed in our transom window but didn't make it into the store before the alarm went off, which is something to be thankful for indeed. After the police and friendly CSI: San Francisco dude had left, we patched up the window with cardboard and ventured out to pick up a Thanksgiving feast-to-go at Pete's BBQ around the corner. Then it was back home, and back into our pjs for our much-needed movie marathon. Phew!