Felt Feelings

Cute crafts have been sweeping the Klang Valley, infiltrating cyberspace and flea markets alike. We’re particularly smitten with the puffy Japanese-inspired felt creations we’ve seen on many a blogshop. Felt is a non-woven cloth made by condensing and pressing wool and other fibres and is particularly good for sewing, as any DIY buff will tell you. We caught up with two passionate DIY chicas that use felt to make all manner of playful artifacts. From brooches to keychains to cheerful decorations, these ladies are ambassadors of kawaii, which is Japanese for “cute.”

MY KEDAI RUNCIT

My Kedai Runcit is a blogshop started by Lim Chin Lay on 26 September last year. “Currently it’s just me and my boyfriend. He claims he’s my Customer Service Director and Accountant,” she says. A fan of old-school convenience stores, coming up with a suitable name for her blogshop was never a problem. “I always yearned to own a kedai runcit when I was younger because I had the fantasy of owning lots of special titbits and ice-creams,” Chin Lay confesses wistfully. “And, kedai runcit sell anything, right? That’s why our tagline is Simply Anything.”

And she does sell almost anything. You’ll find her handmade brooches, pouches and keychains along with selected necklaces, bags, hair accessories and knickknacks from overseas. The main attractions are her limited, handmade felt characters that completely embody the Japanese concept of cute: irrelevant but irresistible. “Kawaii is my inspiration because I love Japan!” gushes this tuan kedai. Think joyous beady-eyed cupcakes and ice-cream brooches (RM15 each), and bemused looking Nintendo Gameboy keychains (RM15 each), which are among her bestsellers.

So how did she get into sewing felt for a living? “Personally, I think I'm a good cook but a bad baker. Since I couldn’t bake a cake for my boyfriend’s birthday, I decided to sew one for him. That was the first felt item I sewed—a 3D chocolate cake.”

Her accessories are painstakingly handmade yet affordable. She even does custom-made orders. Her handstiched felt keychains and brooches go for RM8–RM15 while her pouches sell for RM20–RM30. To check out Klang Valley kawaii, visit mykedai-runcit.blogspot.com.

KIIREY

“I began loving arts and crafts at a very young age” says Kelly Koo, who sells her crafts on Etsy (kiiss.etsy.com) as well as on her own website (www.kiirey.com). She makes a plethora of accessories by hand: brooches, hairpins, rings, necklaces, you name it. “My favourite is still making plushies; small, cute characters,” Kelly admits. “It’s as though I’m giving life to the crafts by making them smile, blush and look adorable.”

It’s clear that Kelly draws much of her inspiration from Japan. “Their crafts are irresistibly cute and colourful. I also used to be an anime and manga fan during my schooling time,” she explains. Possibly her cutest creations are her blushing felt onigiri. Onigiri are Japanese rice balls stuffed with fillings like pickled ume or salted salmon and wrapped in nori (seaweed). While these “plushies” don’t have any particular function other than looking cute, their innocent grins and rotund bodies will have many of you instinctively clearing space for one on your desk. While you’re at it, you might as well submit and get a puffy mushroom brooch to go with your onigiri friend. The power of cute is hard to escape.

Though Kelly lives and works in Malaysia, most of her customers aren’t local. “They are mostly from The States, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, Finland, and I recently had one customer from Luxembourg. The main reason I love to sell my crafts online is because of the borderless exposure. I only have one local customer that bought from my Etsy shop—many locals will think my crafts are expensive, even though they are handmade.”

Being a crafty lass, while fun and rewarding, doesn’t always pay the bills and many crafters have full-time jobs besides running their websites and blogshops. “You are going to laugh,” says Kelly, “My full-time job is totally irrelevant to my interests. I’m an electronic engineer and sometimes I get confused about whether I’m a science person or an art person.” We’re just glad she still has time to create adorable characters to brighten our day. Log on to www.moon-shines.blogspot.com to find out more about Kelly Koo.

Text Maybritt Rasmussen

Article taken from KLue Magazine May 2009, Issue 127