HobbyPrincess: A beautiful offer

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Bus Stop Blog
Girl at a Bus Stop has annotated the manifesto with links to useful examples.
Caterina.net
"There's something different about knowing the people who make your clothes and grow your food, and I think that this will be an enormous force going forward."
I am yer grammar
Interesting perspectives to crafting and DIY as popular culture.
Folkology
Katalin Török discusses the manifesto in respect to her work in Folkology, which is preserving and promoting the Hungarian needle craft tradition.
Edge Perspectives with John Hagel
"Technology is playing a significant role in connecting people who share this passion for creation and, in the process, it is intensifying the urge to create."
Boing Boing
Crafter's manifesto reads like a blueprint for the Enlightenment crossed with an entrepreneur's prayer
Make 04
Crafter's Manifesto could just as easily be read as a call for makers to unite.

The yearly Alvar Aalto symposium in Jyväskylä is a kind of a foo camp for design professionals. This August there was especially one presentation I didn’t want to miss: Dai Fujiwara, creative director of Issey Miyake and the creator of a-poc (a piece of cloth) manufacturing concept.

I had booked us hotels and all was set. Then (oh no!) little Eliel got sick.

Six weeks later at the Valve & Jaiku & Thinglink housewarming party, I met Laura Sarvilinna and Tuuli Sotamaa, who tell me this story: at the same Alvar Aalto symposium that we had missed, Fujiwara had offered to design wedding dresses for a couple who would exchange wedding vows before the end of the year.

Quite extraordinary, I agreed. But even more extraordinary was the fact, Laura exclaimed, that nobody had yet signed up to take the offer! No kidding. But wait a minute, said Laura suddenly, couldn’t you and Jyri get married?

I instantly thought it was a brilliant idea. Jyri’s birthday was a couple of days ahead and I had not yet thought about his present. Yes, that’s it: I’d propose him. Girls, I said, it’s a deal.

And yes: he said yes. Actually, he said “great idea, let’s do it”.

UPDATE: As a result of this project, my name has changed from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen to Ulla-Maaria Engeström. In the slow world of academic publishing, I'll still keep Ulla-Maaria Mutanen as my artist name.