Posted by admin on 2:06 pm
Hey, so Makes have launched! Thank you to all the testers for their feedback and for creating their Makes. Go have a play!
We’ve tried to work in the feedback from the testers but a few of the things that have been recommended were not do-able (and not essential) in the short term. Two things particularly stand out:
- Having made a big deal of the ability to commission one of the Makes from the author, we’ve taken that off, for now at least. We’ll introduce this as an option for authors to check in the process rather than as a default. However, you can still point to items of the Make you have for sale in your shop a “can’t be bothered to Make this? Buy one instead”. I like this feature. Of course you need to have one in the shop for sale – if you don’t the text and link will not appear.
- Copyright. We want to be able to give you the ability to manage the rights of your Makes using Creative Commons licensing. This feels right. They are after all, yours. However, we have not had time to build in the Creative Commons element which allows you to choose the license you want so we’ve launched Makes with the existing Terms of Use which gives you ownership of the content but also give Folksy a license to use the content. But we’re all for re-use and sharing and many of you will be too, so the cc license model will be in place in the not-to-distant future.
We really do hope you like Makes. I know there are a heap of tutorials on the web already (mainly on craft blogs). We’re not in any way trying to muscle in on that, rather we want to promote how things are made. This way, people will see the love that goes into your things and consequently be more interested in buying craft things as well as making them. The more we promote what you do, the more we all benefit.
What’s Next?
We’ve got a few more minor amends we’re implementing for the 12th Dec and then the next big milestone is International Sales in late Feb next year.
Tagged: howto makes making woohoo Category: Home
Posted by admin on 5:17 pm
So, we’re testing Makes this week with a bunch of people who came forward – thank you *so* much you lot. By the end of this week we’ll have collated the feedback and we’ll be making the amends ready to go live. We intend to go live this weekend and with the “how tos” that the volunteers have kindly offered to document. Here’s a big cheer for:
Tagged: madebyyou makes making volunteers Category: Home
Posted by admin on 7:08 pm
So, having re-plumbed the site and made it more stable and reliable we’re on with getting Makes launched for Monday (it may be late on Monday as we’re running out of biscuits and espresso to keep the development going 24/7). We need your help. We want some early testers to help test Makes and show good examples of how you’ve made things. This could be a simple things or a complex thing or well, anything. The key is to do it well and test the functionality.
Who’s up for that? Anyone? All you’ll need is a bit of time and photos of the ‘thing’ as you’re making it. Of course if you’ve taken images whilst you been making a ‘thing’ before you could “do a Blue Peter” and just pretend it was all done like, now.
For an idea of what we’re trying to do with Makes see The Instructables site. This site covers *everything* (mad stuff like this) and we’re just going to focus on crafty things rather than say how to do gelatin/agar filtration.
Whilst I’m here. This is nice:
The last few weeks have been really interesting. We’ve seen a heap (collective noun for crafters and designers please?!) of new crafters and designers come to Folksy to list things for sale and many of these have brought with them a different ‘type’ of thing. Like recent graduate Paul Allen’s stuff, above. Brilliant.
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Posted by admin on 11:22 am
I specifically avoided Origin, The Craft Council’s annual event this year. The flagship UK Craft event left me feeling a bit cold last time I went in 2006. I thought it was a tad too upmarket and whilst there was a lot of great work on display it felt a bit like a gallery or actually a museum. It felt dead. Not a lot of ‘disruption’ going on. And in this way I believe Origin mimics the notion of Craft by the powers that be at the Crafts Council in the UK. To them Craft is undertaken by a privileged artistic few and the arbiters of quality are the gallery curators. It feels like a rather stuffy ‘club’. I can understand why it is so. Before the internet power and decision making was often confereed to the few. It wasn’t well distributed. But now we have the internet we’ve got the ability to ‘filter’. If flickr can enable amateur photographers to compete with professionals (and many photographs, actually ’snapshots’, taken by the unwashed have been used for commercial purposes from flickr) and at the same time encourage the take up of the practice and craft of phtography then surely the same can be true of Craft, of making nice ‘things’. Etsy has done a great job to encourage craft, particularly in the US, and I’m hoping that we can cause a bit of disruption here too.
So, rant over, I’d like to ask you what you think of when you think of ‘Craft’? This is partly in response to this question “The word craft is misused, misunderstood and misplaced. It is used in ways that diminish its credibility” which I came across on the forum of the Craft Scotland site.
NB: for a good overview of the neat stuff at Origin see treehugger’s coverage.
Tagged: craft making Category: Home
Posted by admin on 1:03 pm
Sally from the Manchester Craft Mafia and a Folksy ’super-user’, has put out a call for makers at a Christmas Market the Craft Mafia are organising in Manchester. Looks interesting. This is it:
Which for those people using screen readers and / or for those who don’t want to squint this reads:
Join our Manchester Craft Mafia Christmas Markets @ The Whitworth Art Gallery
- Saturday 13th Dec 10-4
- Sunday 14th Dec 12-4
Stalls cost between
Tagged: christmas craftmafia making markets selling Category: Home
