Please join us in welcoming the newest member of the Department of Top-Notch Textile Art: Northwest Arkansas-based fiber artist Dani Ives, who creates awesomely realistic needle-felted animals as well as plants and even desserts.
Ives describes her method as “painting with wool,” in which she applies her love of animals and her background in biology to build intricately layered portraits of a variety of flora and fauna.
Many of the animals Ives creates are commissioned custom pet portraits, which are available here. She also sells original pieces and prints of her work via her GoodNaturedArt Etsy shop.
This German art student, Benjamin Harff, decided, for his exam at the Academy of Arts, to do something only slightly ambitious — to hand-illuminate and bind a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion. It took him six months of work. He hand-illuminated the text which had been printed on his home Canon inkjet printer. He worked with a binder to assemble the resulting book.
“My grandmother wove in me a tapestry that was impossible to unwind,” Vigo said. “Since then, I’ve dedicated my life to the sea, just as those who have come before me.”
Like the 23 women before her, Vigo has never made a penny from her work. She is bound by a sacred ‘Sea Oath’ that maintains that byssus should never be bought or sold.
Instead, Vigo explained that the only way to receive byssus is as a gift. […]
“Byssus doesn’t belong to me, but to everyone,” Vigo asserted. “Selling it would be like trying to profit from the sun or the tides.”
More recently, a Japanese businessman approached Vigo with an offer to purchase her most famous piece, ‘The Lion of Women’, for €2.5 million. It took Vigo four years to stitch the glimmering 45x45cm design with her fingernails, and she dedicated it to women everywhere.
“I told him, ‘Absolutely not’,” she declared. “The women of the world are not for sale.”
The government is trying to evict her after shutting down her free museum to showcase her work because she refuses their demands she tell her secret.
She needs to raise €85,000 by November 2018 or the town will evict her. She’s only raised €6,472. The page says that there is no goal bc anything they raise is a success but the article says she needs the €85,000 in order to own her home and not be evicted. Chiara Vigo is an amazingly talented Jewish women who deserves to stay in her town close to the ocean !!
Hazel Scott playing two pianos at the same damn time with ease
Hazel Scott was a musical sorcerer and a civil rights hero. She:
was admitted to Julliard at 8.
was performing in top venues by 16.
pioneered “swinging the classics” and made the equivalent of a million dollars a year doing it.
was the first person of color to have their own national TV show.
went to Hollywood but refused to be cast as a “singing maid.” Demanded and got control over her casting, her wardrobe, and how footage featuring her was cut.
refused to perform in segregated venues and led charges for integration in several northern cities, notably Spokane.
She was brought down by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and has been largely forgotten. But she was a sorcerer, and a hero.
And I saw something on their front page that I assumed was the result of someone screwing around that hadn’t been cleaned up yet
So I followed the link, thinking it would lead me to Angelina Jolie’s page with some amusing changes made to it, but instead I found this:
There is actually a trapdoor spider named after Angelina Jolie. And one named after Bono. And Stephen Colbert. Apparently the same scientist discovered all of these and really like naming spiders after celebrities.
Entomologists are just. They do this. Other biologists too, but especially entomologists There’s ants named after Douglas Adams (Tetramorium adamsi), two genera of wasps named after Dante, (Aligheria and Aligherinia), ELEVEN species named after David Attenborough (including a beetle, shrimp, echidna, fish, grasshopper, dragonfly, three plants, two spiders, and a plesiosaur), Two worms named after the Beatles (and no beetles that I’m aware of), two David Bowie spiders (Heteropoda davidbowie and Spintharus davidbowiei).
There’s wasps for both
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (the aforementioned angelinajolieae and Conobregma bradpitti), and Stephen Colbert not only has a spider named after him, but he also then set off a competition between other researchers to name a “way cooler” animal after him, which due to, again, entomologists, ended him up with two beetles, a stonefly, and a wasp (Agaporomorphus, Sonoma, Diamphipnoa and Aleiodes colberti). A fly with a golden butt is named for Beyoncé. There’s an HP Lovecraft wasp named Nanocthulhu lovecrafti. Terry Pratchett got a turtle (
Steel Phoenix Studios 
