Just returned from Copenhagen where we were at reboot. The conference itself was largely forgettable, a shame because the eclectic mix of participants usually means it’s really interesting. But whilst there we got thinking about craft and the name folksy and how actually ‘folksy’ signifies lots of things resonant of handmade, ‘original’ and yet with a certain attitude. However, it’s hard to be any more definite. It’s easier to point and show. And we found a wonderful cafe, Kalaset in Nansensgade where we found lots of Folksy stuff to point at. And so here is some pointing and showing at things that signify folksy:

I love the 50s aesthetic. It’s redolent of those ‘good housekeeping’ books of the era and I imagine, homage to the birth of the ‘home economy’.

The intro to the menu. It’s so good I want to repeat it:

It was in my grandmother’s kitchen on Vasavagan that I fell in love with cokking.

As a child, cutting a tomato or whipping creamcould turn into the most exciting adventure.

Sunday dinners at my grandma’s were a big ceremony with lengthy and detailed preparations.

In that neat and busy kitchen a world of mystery and joy opened up for me. Simple things mixed with love and care would turn into a delicious blueberry cake, or a fantatsic ‘kantarel’ soup.

Kalaset is as much the fruit of my work & passion, as my grandmother’s legacy. What you’re holding in your hands is a reproduction of her beloved cookbook, the inspiration behind countless and wondewrful afternoons spent in the sanctuary of her kitchen.

I hope Folksy can foster half the spirit in a new generation as Caroline’s grandmother did.

The last ‘point at’ is a nod toward the sharing and communal aspects of folksy. This simple ‘gift’ concept in the cafe is inspired and, I believe, is exactly the sort of transactions [over time and space] that the web has enabled more easily. It’s cool, isn’t it?

For those wanting more overty crafty stuff there’s a thriving craft scene in Copenhagen [and I’d love to hear from anyone part of that] as evidenced in the work of Bitch Slap and a number of crafty stores up and down Ravnsborggade in Norrebro.

ta to Russell for the images.

photo by cyron

One of the things we always bat on about is how we [and our work clients] should be embedded into the web and not just sat on it. So, we’re eating our own dog food and trying to be far more integrated. Woohoo! If you have the inclination to you can find us on some of the web services that litter the www.

For our travels and tours we’re using dopplr. We like to travel but so far we’re struggling to have the kind of ‘international jet set’ life [and the carbon footprint] dopplr seems to support so well. Still, we’ll put the trips to Weymouth, Burnley and Bristol up there in the hope we’ll be seen by some business class consumers. Flickr is obviously our visual repository and probably the place we’ll be busiest in the coming weeks as we explore some of the wonderful craft and design groups. del.icio.us is our home of all general linkage and we’ll be looking to aggregate some of the tags and blog them as and when. “GetFolksy” is going to be our moniker generally for all things web, so if you’re ever on something and you wonder if we are then use that name [although having now said that some punk is sure to do a quick land grab!]. If we’re not there and you think we should be then please tell us. Thanking you kindly.

via exfordy

Gestation periods are usually predictable. Hamsters take around 16 days. They’re quick. The MySociety chaps knock out stuff at a ferocious pace. They’re the hamsters. Elephants have the longest gestation period of any land mammal. We’re the elephant of the web world having said that we’d be launching around this time last year. But trying to take some positives from this, elephants are pretty cool. They have laudable characteristics… good matriarchal social structures and er, big feet. We’ve got excuses for not being hamsters of course. In this horribly long gestation we’ve done a bunch of other things, as well as working to develop Folksy.

And so here we are 12mths after our near birth. We’re having a go again. The baby is moving. It’s moving largely because CJ and Russell have been pushing and prodding [can I take this metaphor too far…?]. Thank you. The due date is the 5th July to tie in with the New Designers event in London where 2000 graduates will be standing and smiling, mainly. We’ll be working with some of them and kicking off what will be a proper beta launch which will run until London Design Week where we’ll be doing ‘stuff’. A bunch of stuff actually. And this will be the more formal public launch.

We’ll be posting with far greater frequency. However, if you want to chat or find out more then email james at folksy dot co dot uk :)

UPDATE: just confirmed, we’ll be running workshops in a big tent at Lovebox, July 19th 20th in Victoria Park. We’ll post up what we’ll be making and who’ll be helping us next week.

Kindly invited to judge the MMU Degree show awards today. Lots of talent. Tiffany won our vote and our purchase prize. Well done Tiffany! The ‘optic’ lamp was a personal favourite – need to find an image for this my camera broke – the concept being justified [and I paraphrase] with “chaps often find sleep hard to come by. A good stiff drink solves the problem. Have it handy and watch your lights go out”. Ace.

Stumbled across this “small manufacturing arm”. I like the idea of small manufacturing arms, they seem analogous to the notion of microformats in that they bridge the gap between materials and the end user in small ways which work for a particular use case, audience or need rather than the Model T Ford, Taylorist approach.

The Thumb War Battle of 1596 by Small Objects

The Guardian had a great supplement yesterday that took some of the best “makes” from some of the best craft books edited into their guide to Make Your Own Christmas Gifts which doesn’t seem to have been republished online, but The Guardian website is maddeningly poor on Search. Can anyone see it on the www? If you’ve no patience to get down and dirty then there’s still one day left of The Manchester Craft Mafia’s Christmas Market at Urbis in Manchester. Shed loads of talent all hewn and sewn together expertly by Sal who has some pics here.

As a bit of an update, you’ll have gathered we haven’t launched Folksy… we’ve missed the Christmas / Seasonal beta we were hoping to push out. This is largely due to the fact that Rob and I have been too busy on paid projects to launch it properly. It’s built, tested and nearly ready to go, bar a bit of copywriting. So the easy bit is done. The hard bit, as we’ve slowly come to realise, is that to do things properly takes more than just one afternoon a week: launching a service is practically full-time. So we’ve been looking for people to help us with Folksy and whilst we can’t say anything yet, we’ll hopefully be starting work again on Folksy with a new member who’s a fab crafty-curator who can help us dedicate proper time to launch and maintain it.

The Manchester Craft Mafia are being christened on the 2nd Sept. We’re hoping to make it. Well done to Sally et al for creating the third installment of the mafia “family” [after Glasgow and Leeds] :)

Elsewhere, Lucia has pointed me to The Make Lounge, coming out of Angel, London, which looks achingly hip and follows on the back of Stitch and Bitch London and Make London in providing outlets for “mutant material gestation” or just making stuff.

And even more elsewhere, we’re still doing shiftwork to get Folksy out. The final copy is being sorted and minor design ticks and irritations erased…. if you’re in the Sheffield area then do drop in and mop our brows put the kettle on.

We’re doing the last stages of alpha testing the site, getting rid of bugs and glitches, with a view to beta testing with crafters next week and a full beta by the end of August. If you want to sign up on the main page we’ll mail you when we’re doing the full beta.

The fête was fab. We had over 250 people come and make things in the Folksy tent and the faces on the children and adults who came out with their creations was worth it in itself. Thanks to everyone who came along and to the crafters who helped us to make it such a great success: Bettina, Jo, Carole and Alicia.

The retoyed trash “mutant creatures” start to take shape…

Fabric for the mutants…

A cute mutant…

An old cardie takes on a new life…

A cross between a whale and a bird

We were down for a while. No-one seemed to notice which bodes well for future down time. The reason was to try and cloak the site [which sounds a bit Klingon doesn’t it?], to enable us to buy folksy.com for a discounted fee. Of course we probably didn’t get it for a discounted fee as our cloaking device isn’t of intergalactic quality nor is the professional domain hoarder as dumb as we would like. Still now we have it. Enjoy it. Does it look any different to dot.co.uk, can you feel the quality? :)

Crafting things takes time but not nearly as long as it takes to organise crafters. The Innocent Fete is with us and we were kindly invited to come along and make stuff in our very own big tent. Getting makers to help out proved “non-trivial” in the holiday season with 2 weeks notice. Still, we did it – thanks Bettina, Jo, Alicia and Carole! We’ll be making beaded necklaces and bracelets, pencil cases and purses, personalised bags and bandana style collars and plush dolls. Come and find us in the kids enclosure. We’ll be policing the tent, preventing unprovoked knitting needle enabled attacks. Chamomile [or calpol…] infused lolly pops, anyone?

We were at Interesting2007 today, the day were were hoping to launch a beta beta or rough, rough or half-baked or whatever version of the service. However, we had a few teething problems and the beta beta [or… ] will have to wait a week or so. Still, ‘Interesting’ was excellent. Freakish weather meant Rob and Debs didn’t get to London until 11am – when the conference started – so I [James] leant on Gabriel [Gabriel, thank you!] who was fabulous in helping me create the “craft concept retail space” in the gloomy oak lobby of the Conway Hall.

We set up our stall trying to create a living room environment which kinda worked, but what did work was our “make table” where we beavered away making blinkybugs [see below] and Rob being far more technical hacked a Nintendo controller to make an optical mouse and also made an “ambient orb light” which responded to ‘the internet’. What about the internet it was responding has not yet become clear.

Anyway, we had a great time, got lots of good feedback, not to mention loads of beta testers and a possible invite to do a big festival event this summer and I got to have a brief chat with Matthew D’Ancona [albeit unwittingly] which was marvelous. Thanks Russell :) and thanks to all those crafters who helped us to provide goods for the event [Lucia, Alice, Zoe, etc…].

Rob got carried away [.. sorry!] with Jed’s Transitional Objects, or the intelligent balloons, @Reboot. Jeff’s work was inspired by Bruce Sterling, who was his mentor in the US. The balloons move and light up in response to GSM devices e.g. mobiles and they are also light sensitive. All quite cool, though one got lost in the rafters; old fashioned physics won over there. Providing Rob thinks we can get hold of commercial grade helium and then get the mix right, we’re bringing one to Interesting2007

Update (from robl) : We have one (big thanks Jed and Thomas), so I’ll be firing up my soldering Iron and sourcing some helium and we’ll be building one at the folksy stand – come and help build our autonomous army ! You can see a few more pictures on our folksy flickr feed.

A little late in the day now, but I thought it's worth mentioning James and I are at Reboot 9.0 in Copenhagen. If you'd like to come and have a chat to us (about anything really) or want to see some more of what folksy is really about then leave a comment or just come and search us out, we'd love to hear what you've got to say.

One or two people have asked about where the name Folksy originated. I really don’t know. There were a few other names knocking around at the time – zakka [after the Japanese home craft craze] being one and stitchy being another.

Now, having dug around a bit I see that it has a pretty broad use, mainly signifying: informal; familiar; rural and of course to describe the Folk music and fashion ‘style’. For me it’s about people and celebrating everyday creativity in an age which often reduces us to Taylorist automatons in offices everywhere [and see Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk on YouTube on how we’re killing creativity in the education process]. And if you’re interested it’s worth seeing what other people signify as folksy [and get a sense for how creativity in crafts is flourishing] and there’s no better place to do that than on flickr.