This is a cool story both because of the innovative use of popular photo site Flickr and because it involves my sister and her Art Dolls Blog too.
Seems that Craft Magazine is running a Halloween craft competition for the creepiest and scariest crafts and my sister was picked for her weird disembodied hand pincushion.
As the Craft folk say on their blog: “Yikes! This is creepy, CRAFT Flickr photo pool member AK-IceCube made this severed hand pincushion and entered it in the MAKE & CRAFT Halloween contest, woo! You can see more photos and some of the construction here, nice work!”
As a result of this, my sister’s already sold two new pincushions, but more on that — including a creepy picture of the disembodied hand — after the jump…

First off, now’s a good time to check out the Craft Magazine Flickr Pool so you can get a quick sense of some of the strange and disturbing crafts that people are creating for the upcoming Halloween season. Heck, some of the cutesy ones are the scariest of all! Yikes!
Craft’s really doing something smart with its competition too, as you can see when you read the contest submission guidelines:
“Decorations at home, work, wherever, a haunted house, lawn gadgets, anything Halloweeny. If you’re one of those makers or crafters who goes all out and makes their surroundings spooky in some way, take a photo! Then upload your photos to the MAKE or CRAFT Flickr photo pool and tag them “MAKECRAFTHALLOWEEN” Or you can email them to us, just be aware that we’re going to upload them to the MAKE and CRAFT Flickr photo pool. We will spotlight some of our favorite Halloween related projects all this month to inspire folks.”
Brilliant! To enter the competition simply upload a picture onto Flickr and tag it with a special word that the editors can then use to identify that not only are you interested in Create, but you’re also entering a specific contest. No forms, no judges, no complexity, just a very sharp use of a popular photo sharing site.
My sister also shared her experience:
“I submitted one of my severed hand pincushion photos to a Craft magazine Halloween contest – they have a Flickr photo pool. They featured it on their main blog this morning and I’ve already got 2 orders for pincushions. Sweet. I’ve sold five of these things now. Who knew!!”
Here’s that scary pincushion for your viewing pleasure:

Kinda just a little bit disturbing, but I like it!
And heck, I know you know someone who would love to get this as a Halloween present too, it’s far more fun than a box of chocolates or vampire teeth, isn’t it? Send a quick email to my sister at ak_icecube -at- yahoo.com and you too can own one of these creepy pups.
Me? I’d just be afraid that I’d hear an “Ouch!” every time I put a pin in the hand… 😉