Sick and tired of essentially living inside a giant cloud of pepper spray, residents of Irwindale, CA petitioned to have the Huy Fong Foods factory (makers of Sriracha) shut down until they can regulate their fumes. Yesterday, city officials filed suit. A judge will decide on Thursday whether or not to grant the order.
I got another dick pic yesterday. And I have to say, this one wasn’t bad. Usually, the pics I get remind me of scenes from TREMORS, but this one was back lit with some soft afternoon light. Fine. Still, I felt the same way I do when I get a present from my mother. I pretend to act excited, and say things like “Oh!…
Cronuts, the hybrid CROissant-doNUT that's captivated the internet's lust for novelty sweets, can only be found in one bakery in Manhattan
Much has been written about the so-called "new domesticity," the surge in interest in things like canning, pickling, cooking, bread-baking, sewing, knitting, and gardening, which — at least if one were to judge by the pages of Etsy.com, the "crafts" category on Pinterest, or the stalls of your local hipster market —…
Welcome back to Friday DIY, where we spend hours making everyday things, because shopping in stores is for quitters. This week's project is a leather belt, and I was lucky enough to be schooled in the art of belt making by a young man named Maximum Cohen.
Roopa Vasudevan, a graduate student in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, used cross-stitch to represent women's voting patterns in this year's presidential election. Her work, currently on display in New York, is a series of embroidered panels, one for each of 11 chosen states. In each…
Is Martha Stewart, Our Lady of Cranberry Relish and Thinly Veiled Apoplexy, the latest mascot of 21st-century hipsterdom? I have no idea, but the internet certainly has feelings on the subject! According to some breathless trend-gathering in the New York Times, young "hipster" people with novelty pants and artisanal last …
Got some crafty people on your holiday gift list? Fear not — a present like one of these is bound to please even the pickiest of Do It Yourselfers. (And — self-interested bonus! — it virtually guarantees years of awesome knitted/crocheted/sewn or otherwise home-built gifts for you in turn.)
I don't give a shit what anyone says, Thanksgiving is about mashed potatoes. And maybe pumpkin pie, if you're stretching it. But turkey? It takes time, it's easy to screw up, it can be stringy and bone dry, and even the best bird just tastes like...turkey. Which is not always a good thing. Or, you know, you just don't…
Want to make the Eagle Award — the top honor an Eagle Scout can earn — more friendly to all? Or just have a dope fashion accessory to rock at the club? Was that second sentence embarrassing? I'm pretty sure it was but I'm keeping it in because I would totally have done that in the mid-90s.
A few weeks ago, my friend Lux Alptraum (who runs the fantastically NSFW porn blog Fleshbot) asked me if I could teach her how to do cross-stitch embroidery. Sure, I said. Needlepoint was actually one of the first crafts I learned, and I still find it extraordinarily comforting. And cross-stitch is one of the easiest…
As soon as Karl Lagerfeld showed those ridiculous(ly sublime) hula-hoop bags on the Chanel runway for spring, my colleague Dodai and I knew we had to make one. "It's not up to me to say it is chic," said
Are you ready for a nail DIY? This project explains how you can layer fabric paint over nail polish to achieve something akin to those "antique" and "distressed" paint effects that are so popular on home-decorating programs. (You know the ones where some hyperactive blonde is always convinced that what this suburban…
Or: Quick and Dirty Pattern-Draping for Fun and Profit! If you're even a neophyte home sewer, you've probably dreamed of making clothing from your own customized patterns. Commercial patterns are fantastic in many ways — the sheer variety always makes flipping through a pattern book (or browsing vintage reproductions…
This week's DIY is a t-shirt DIY — which is, in case you haven't guessed, one of my favorite
Summer's coming. Couldn't you stand to have some whimsical sunglasses in your life?
Strapless dresses: is there any other garment that promises so much, but at such high risk? If you've owned or worn a strapless dress, you've probably spent at least one night pulling the damn thing up every couple of minutes. That's because most strapless dresses are too cheaply made to provide sufficient support to…
Ombré patterns have been everywhere as of late. The French word ombré means "shaded," and in fashion it refers to pretty much anything that starts out one color and then slowly morphs into another. We've weathered trends for ombré hair, ombré clothes, ombré fur — last summer I even showed you how to ombré dye a scarf
One of the easiest things you can do to spruce up your living environment is re-covering a throw pillow or three. It's a great use for an eye-catching fabric-and-piping combination, because pillows are small and a busy print won't overwhelm a room. It takes no complicated sewing know-how — just a machine and an ability …
Remember when we decided that Rick Santorum needed a uterus of his very own
Outside of a bread machine, this is the easiest bread recipe humans have yet devised. You know refrigerator bread? It's easier than that. You know no-knead bread? It's easier than that. Why? Because it's a no-knead refrigerator bread! Once the dough is ready — and the measuring and mixing only takes about 20 minutes —…
When I was watching Rihanna's "You Da One" video, I was struck by two things: one was the incredible shot-by-shot similarity
If you've never made a purse before, this just might be the purse for you. My last bag, the envelope clutch
Yeah, I made a wreath out of tampons. What? It's no secret I have a vajay and this shit's fertile as fuq.
For me, a big part of the pleasure of giving a loved one a gift is in the wrapping. I'm not planning to give or receive many gifts this year — I have enough stuff, for real
People who were part of the Black Pride movement of the 1960s also took pride in wearing their hair natural instead of using straightening combs or chemical relaxers. Their pride in African culture was an Afro-centric view that really shook (read: terrified) most middle-class Americans. The way they wore their hair was …
The idiosyncratic but engaging Twitter personality known as @kanyewest has now had some of his best work highlighted by needlepointer Amy Sheridan. Sheridan — and yes, the particular pieces shown in her Etsy listing are sold, but she'll get you "a brand new one, made just for you" — has immortalized some of the rapper's…
I love eyebrows. I love the variety of eyebrows people have. I love thick ones, thin ones, long ones, short ones. I love really dramatically arched ones and I love flat ones, too. I have always been into eyebrows. When I was a tween — not that we used that word back then — I used to stare long and hard at each new…
When you left the house this morning, everything was fine. But suddenly, through some twist of fate, weather shenanigans, or all-out clumsiness on your part, your footwear situation went awry and now, here you are with a broken heel in the middle of a snowstorm. What are you going to do?
I was raised in a temperate climate — New Zealand, to be precise — but it didn't take me long to grasp the absolute, primal importance of coats in much of North America. (Moving to Minnesota in January will teach you the value of a proper winter coat in, oh, about 15 seconds. Which is about the time it took the parts…
