I blame Misha Collins.* Partly because he’s so darn easy and fun to blame for all manner of chaos. Partly because it really is his fault. The crafting frenzy I’ve recently been indulging in got kicked into high gear with GISHWHES, aka the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen, brainchild of Misha Collins. Instead of merely finding things the game commanded us to make things or to cause various bizarre events and document them. Did you happen to see the news story about the floating Christmas tree that was carried toward a British Columbia airport, prompting the woman who unleashed it to call the RCMP to alert them? You could blame Misha for that, and you’d be correct. That was a GISHWHES team in action. Incidentally, GISHWHES was not just a scavenger hunt but an attempt at breaking the Guinness World Record for largest international scavenger hunt. We’re all still waiting for word from Guinness on whether that happened, but with over 600 teams, I think we probably did it.

So. Yes. Craft frenzy. In the course of the 10-day hunt, I made several things: a laptop made entirely of felt, a chandelier of kale, a 2-ft. sculpture of a seagull made entirely of tampons and sanitary napkins. I’ll pause while you let that sink in.

And the frenzy has continued beyond the hunt. I’m still playing with felt, as well as silk and wood and Mod Podge and dye. I am backing away slowly from the sanitary napkins and kale.

I also blame Jonathan Coulton.** Some years ago he did a weekly podcast called A Thing A Week, which lasted over the course of a year. Each podcast was a song that he’d recorded — most of which he wrote. So his creative frenzy inspired mine.

So basically that’s the deal here. I’m planning to make things for the next year, one per week. What does not kill me makes me stronger — and may make me a buck or two on Etsy.

This isn’t a tutorials blog — I’ll provide links to project sources, unless I made the thing up, in which case I will provide information on how to do it. (Or at least how I did it.) This is mostly about the process and the pictures. And the disasters, on occasion. Think of this as more Julie/Julia than Martha Stewart. (Oh yeah, I blame Julie Powell, too.)

* Who is Misha Collins? He’s an actor, recently a regular on Supernatural, as well as a bad guy that Kiefer Sutherland punched in the throat on 24 and a talk show host who’s a mixture of Art Bell and Carl Sagan on Stonehenge Apocalypse. (And may MY dying words echo his: “IT WAS A ROBOT HEAD!!”) He holds a really rather unseemly sway over his fans.

** Who is Jonathan Coulton? The troubadour of science nerds and science fiction geeks and pretty damn funny. Known for many many things, but I’ll take the anthem of corporate drone zombies “Re: Your Brains” and the folkie cover of “Baby Got Back.”