Here’s a quick round-up of some crafty stuff I’m excited about this week — first up, the Flower Power Challenge contest over at CraftStylish! Just make something flower-y and cool and add it to their gallery by Sept. 30 for your chance to win some pretty amazing Crafty Chica-themed prizes — all the details are here.

I wrote up a few quick tutorials for crafty flower-type things over there this month so please check them out if you’re interested, contest-wise or just for fun! Last week’s was a fabric applique-embellishment project:

and this upcoming Sunday’s revisits a grade-school favorite, making beaded daisy chains! (update: here’s the direct link.)

Check the site on Sunday or after to see both of them, or you can just stop by my page to see all my various beading and jewelry-making posts if you’re so inclined.

I also fell in love with a new (to me) craft site this week: Obama Craft Project, brought to you by the lovely duo behind Sewer-Sewist. They spotlight tons of inspiring crafts for change in all genres and often offer patterns or share links for making your own versions. Submit yours to the site or to their flickr pool to become part of the collection!

I met Lise this weekend at Crafty Wonderland when she was registering people to vote, and saw the awesome Obama hat she’s designed and knitted.

She’s generously sharing the pattern as a freebie, so the OCP folks have put it up as a downloadable PDF here. Here are three variations to get you started, too!

On that note, I wanted to mention that I am hosting an Obama postcard-writing party here in Portland next week, if you’re interested in writing a few cards to voters. I wrote about my first batch over here, but for this round, I am going to get crafty and gocco-print some map images, like this Oregon quilt square I printed last year for my Modern Heirloom Quilt in CRAFT: magazine.

I’ll bring the gocco printer and a big stack of cards for people to write, but please bring your own cards (handmade or souvenir) if you’d like to, along with pens and some 27¢ stamps. I’m bringing Pearl, and it is definitely baby- and kid-friendly if you are traveling with a crew. I’ll take care of sending all the cards out in a batch by September 30 to save postage and extra trips to the post office. If you’re free, please stop by and please spread the word to friends who might be interested too. Thanks!

Postcard Party
Tandem Coffeehouse
3041 SE Division St., Portland
Friday, Sept. 26 from 11am-2pm
Hope to see you!