Sanfranblissco

Etsy is often like a thrift store -- it can require a lot of time and patience to pick through a lot of crap (or more importantly, overpriced crap) to find the really well-crafted gems. In order to take the guesswork out of your valiant attempts to support local artists, each week we provide you with a few awesome shops.

Last week we offered up a series of artists to celebrate love with romantic depictions of sweet, sweet romance. This week we may have gotten a little carried away with all the accessories, but with four shops to choose from, you should be able to find plenty of gifts for your amour or yourself. The recent sunshine has us missing the beach, and it shows in this week's picks.

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House of Nines Design

Etsy is often like a thrift store -- it can require a lot of time and patience to pick through a lot of crap (or more importantly, overpriced crap) to find the really well-crafted gems. In order to take the guesswork out of your valiant attempts to support local artists, each week we provide you with a few awesome shops.

In case you missed missed it, last week's Etsy of the Week featured cards for every occasion, from birthdays to apologies. Snail mail may have gone out of style, but hopefully it inspired some party invitations, so you can make use of this week's sweet headgear.

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Emma SanCartier Illustration

With a thriving creative community, it's unsurprising that San Francisco's craftspeople and artists have also taken to the Internet to promote and sell their creations. Etsy alone is home to thousands of handmade products, many hailing from the Bay Area. However, the result is often like a thrift store -- it can require a lot of time and patience to pick through a lot of crap (or more importantly, overpriced crap) to find the really well-crafted gems. So in order to take the guesswork out of your valiant attempts to support artists, here is your weekly dose of shops by locals.

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Erika Henrikson

This Friday, San Francisco will once more pour out onto the Mission streets (those poor, battered, and abused streets!) for the 26th Annual Dia de los Muertos parade. Yet another pagan festival turned Catholic holiday, Dia de los Muertos is a hybrid celebration of Aztec/Meso-American reverence and remembrance of the dead and the Spanish-Catholic All Souls' Day. It is also yet another excuse for San Franciscans to don outrageous costumes, fantastical makeup, and dance around in the middle of the road! So, we're obviously excited about it.

See also:

Video of the Day: Dia de los Muertos Parade and Art Show

Podcast Review: The Grimaldis Are Dead

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By Agnes Teesdale

BDSM and D.I.Y. craftiness go together like Lindsay Lohan and prescription drugs. But getting kinky can
sometimes be daunting to the novice player, what with all those expensive toys and fancy
outfits. Even if you're an experienced player, making something for the special sadist in
your life can be a nice way to express your dirty, dirty feelings. With that in mind, here are three sex toys that are
easy, quick, and made with items you probably already have at home.

Rubber band flogger

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Megan being cozy and six months pregnant.

MakeShift is a new design series for city dwellers with roommates, space constrictions, and other such awkwardness. It's a conversation for people who are being artful with their space and kicking ass while doing it. 

Wanna be featured in the next MakeShift? Write to: makeshiftsubmission@gmail.com

For those of you dreaming in black and white and fearing that color might further implode your tiny hovel, let us not forget the wise acronym-slash-life-lesson of our teenagers -- "YOLO!" -- and blast up our walls like the Kool-Aid man is gonna crash through with eight new tropical flavors. 

High school English Teacher/Writer Megan and her husband, Creative Warehouse Manager Manny, candy-sweetened their two-bedroom home -- and they can. Because they "mix it with love and make the world taste good."

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Gilberto Schaefer and Jared Higbee

Shh, a little tree bench is being built outside.

MakeShift is a new design series for city dwellers with roommates, space constrictions, and other such awkwardness. It's a conversation for people who are being artful with their space and kicking ass while doing it.

Want to be in the next MakeShift? Submit to: makeshiftsubmission@gmail.com

Jared Higbee and Michael Morse, bartenders with backgrounds in bioengineering and self-taught furniture building, respectively, are roommates who are all about making stuff, parties, and preventing drunks from nearby bars from pissing on their tree outside.

To accomplish the latter, they built a "tree bench."

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Renegade Craft Fair

It's a little too easy to take a Portlandia approach to craft fairs, what with the hipsterrific tendency of local DIYers to put birds on everything and call it a day -- and yes, we guarantee that you will see more than one bird-centric tote today -- but The Fifth Annual Renegade Craft Fair is anything but mock-worthy.

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San Jose hosts Further Confusion 2012, California's largest annual furry convention, starting today (Thursday). Further Confusion 2011's attendance hit 2,801, and more than 3,000 attendees are expected this year. (Glossary Tip: The overall furry scene, fans, fursuiters, and those elsewhere on the spectrum, are collectively referred to as "the fandom.")

Lee Strom co-founded the first Further Confusion in 1999, and he has been actively involved with the fandom since before then as a fursuit maker -- including as the head of Frolic's NeonBunny -- as well as a party organizer and general raccoon-about-town. We spoke with Strom -- whose fandom name is Chairo (\chi'-ro\) -- about the history, art, and business of fursuits.

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When I was a kid, for Christmas I got one of those dolls whose hair sprouted from the crown of her head when you cranked her arm clockwise like a pencil sharpener. The first thing I wanted to do was give her a haircut, so once I got away from the prying eyes of Mom and Dad, I hacked off her blond ponytail with a pair of scissors. Then I rotated her arm a couple of turns, and, like magic, her hair re-grew.

Naturally I applied this same logic to my new kitten's fur and whiskers -- if I cut them off, they'd grow back immediately, right? Unfortunately that was not the case, and the poor fella spent several weeks barefaced and sporting several unsightly bald spots. (Don't worry, though: His hair and whiskers did eventually grow back, and he lived happily for 17 years. Also, my parents yelled at me.)

If only I'd read Crafting with Cat Hair: Cute Handicrafts to Make with Your Cat, Japanese author Katsori Tsutaya's step-by-step guide to turning your pets' fur balls into felt and thereby cementing your status as the crazy cat lady, I would have known that scissors are not an appropriate implement for harvesting cat hair: "When crafting with your cat, it is important to remove hair only by gentle brushing. Do not shave your cat."

This is good to know, because when the title says "handicrafts to make with your cat," it isn't just being cute. These crafts contain their DNA.

Coming up: I harvest my own cats' fur and construct some handicrafts... while drunk. On silliness!

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