Craft Hacker Manifesto

Welcome, one and all, to Craft Hacker: a one-stop blogging shop for your daily(ish) crafty needs. Whether you’re a die-hard craft aficionado or a fair-weather window shopper, Craft Hacker aims to inspire, highlight, educate and entertain on all topics crafty and interiors-related with a big, healthy dollop of eco and vintage thrown in for good measure. So, to get things started, a little background info:

Q: Who is Craft Hacker?

A: It’s me: I’m Joanna Thornhill, and I’m a Craft Addict. Whether I’m repurposing an old table or knocking up a lampshade out of an old jumper, I get a massive kick out of crafting and looking at pretty, crafty things. Just as well really when it comes to my day job – I work freelance within interior styling, set dressing and props for broadcast, stills, events, domestic interiors and any other companies willing to pay me! My work means I often have to think on my feet, customising things to fit the brief at the last minute – from chopping up fabric to create a textured wall panel, to stealing a faux flower from an Easter bonnet to jazz up a cushion cover.

Q: What is Craft Hacker?

A: Craft Hacker is the best term I can think of to describe exactly what it is I love doing, and what I admire so much in the people and products I see around me. To me, the term means to create or repurpose something using skills and ideas taken from traditional crafts, but reworking them to suit the individual’s purpose. I strongly believe that the only thing you need to be a Craft Hacker is a little imagination – specialist skills, pots of money and regimented formulaic design have no place here. With the credit crunch weighing down over us and the volatile state of our planet, it has never been more relevant for us all to look around us at what we already have before hitting the shops: we owe it to both our pockets, and the planet, to adopt a more grassroots, make-do-and-mend mentality. At the same time, however, I also strongly believe this should not, and does not have to be, at the compromise of good design. I’m all for turning old toilet rolls into desk tidies, as long as it doesn’t actually look like I use bog-roll innards to hold my pens. There are ways and means of doing things, and Craft Hacker is here to help guide, both by example and through highlighting the work of other talented crafty folk out there in cyberspace.

Q: Why blog?

A: To inspire and educate other good craft, interiors and design-loving folk out there, and to ‘big up’ the British craft scene in an information superhighway which is currently very US-centric.