The News competition closes on the 9th – this Friday! Since the competition was launched on the 8th of Dec we’ve had lots of stories to go at. What have you chosen?

If you haven’t seen the competition until now you still have time to enter. Post your entry to the “Make the News” Flickr group with a description saying which story your design relates to. We’ll post these here on the blog on Friday (closes at midnight GMT) for people to vote on over the weekend. The vote will be in comments here, like the Folksy Angels comp. Additionally Laura from Robson and Mason will pick her favourite entry to receive a selection of craft books:

• Weekend Crochet for Babies by Sue Whiting (Amazon UK)
• Beautiful Crochet for Heads, Hands and Toes by Melody Griffiths (Amazon UK)
• Beautiful Knits for Heads, Hands and Toes by Alison Dupernex (Amazon UK)

And that was the news today, good day

Link to Comp

The Guardian mentioned Folksy in their “What Not To Miss in 2009” article (in the Freecycle bit) along with Etsy as Craft Superstores. Not sure about the ‘Superstore’ but it was nice to see we’re getting some greater awareness.

I thought it may be worth mentioning things we’ve been doing to try to promote Folksy too. We’ve been working with a national charity to try to organise a competition for London Fashion Week at the end of February. The stumbling block is a space in London to showcase the work. We’ll find out this week if that is a goer. If we can’t do it for the Fashion Week then we’ll look at other dates later in the year. Upcycling charity stock for fashion has been a core practice amongst students for as long as there have been charity shops.

We got shortlisted by the new Channel 4 initiative 4IP for a project entitled “To Hell With Mattel” which was to be a national project to get people making things, a counter-cultural poke at our desire for cheap plastic imports. That would have been fun but didn’t make the final fund, mainly because we couldn’t have started in time for Christmas. It’s one for the future.

We also ran a small PR-y Christmas gift-a-thon to journalists. That was well received and we hope we’re now at least on the horizon of the writerly peeps. Upcoming mentions in Elle and Country Living amongst others, testify to this.

So, we’re busy and will have competitions and stuff in the pipeline to announce soon.

News is communicated in lots of different ways. Through images, which often become iconic (think of Margaret Thatcher waving out of the window at No. 10 as she was ousted, or sunshine in the artic for global warming stories), through satire, such as cartoons (I love Martin Rowson’s work) and of course through text. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a go at representing the news in craft form? Topical craft!

This post on The Storque prompted my interest. Obama mania crept into craft stuff. Sellers realised topical things, especially of the chosen one, would sell. I’m not sure that’s always going to be the case, but it would be fun to have a different take on the news, through craft (drawings, prints, simple made objects). So, let’s try and create the slowest news ever and make the news in craft form?

Laura, of the excellent haberdashers Robson and Mason has offered up £25 of haberdashery ‘stuff’ to the most interesting take on the news. This ties in with Laura giving 10% off all R&M orders when you give your Folksy username. Woo, thanks Laura :) Additionally, the winner will be our inaugral interviewee for Folksy’s new “Meet the Maker”, where we’ll interview a Folksy seller every fortnight about their work and feature their shop.

The Brief

The brief is simple: craft something that is topical (UK News) over the next three weeks. This could be a person who is topical for some reason (e.g. today it’s Dame Judy Dench and then there’s the Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin who is topical for letting the police raid the Parliament), something in the news (debt, as ever, Irish Pork, the Church or an event (runway protests at Stanstead perhaps?). The BBC is always a good place to start. You’re free to have a go at anything you want from a recent news event or article (the more topical the better, best not go for a source like this, or maybe actually you should, it looks like fun does that).

How it Works

The flickr group “Make the News” is the repository for this stuff. Put images of your thing there, the title will be the headline and the description should say a bit about the story you’ve chosen and a link to the news article / source of inspiration. That’s it.

We’ll follow the same process as for the We Make comp. Put the pics on flickr. On midnight of the 7th Jan we’ll put the images on the blog for you to vote on and the close for votes will be midnight on the 9th Jan.

image by jamesb