What do Conan O'Brien, Etsy.com and the Smurfs all have in common?
Linkin Park offers custom T-shirts and a benefit album for Japan tsunami victims through its "Music for Relief" charity.
Mike Shinoda saw images of the devastation in Japan and knew he had to do something.
As many Americans were spending Christmas night with their families, Olek, a New York based artist was near Wall Street, freezing her fingers to the bone while outfitting the famous "Charging Bull" into a giant knitted cozy.
Buying gifts for co-workers can be pretty tough. You have to draw that line between "fun" and "appropriate" so you don't offend anyone or come across as unprofessional (especially to your boss).
Worried about an up-close-and-personal body scan or a particularly touchy pat-down during holiday travel this week?
When temperatures start to dip to uncomfortable lows at night, there are always calls from charities to donate blankets and warm clothes for homeless people. Some iReporters came up with less predictable ways to help their fellow humans and make a creative impact in the lives of those less fortunate.
Seth Priebatsch was at a burrito joint in Boston recently when a message popped up on his smartphone from an app called SCVNGR.
At first glance it may look more like a black box than a millionaire's play pen, but "unfold" this superyacht and a world of luxury and opulence is unveiled.
Women are being forced into backstreet abortions in Kenya because of the country's restrictive abortion law, a study says.
Confusion over Kenya's current abortion law forces some women to the back streets. CNN's David McKenzie reports.
One of the Greensboro 4 speaks to CNN's Fredricka Whitfield about the sit-in in Woolworth's 50 years ago.
As the elderly white woman approached the four black students at the Woolworth's whites-only lunch counter, Franklin McCain braced for the worst.
Photojournalist John Bena introduces us to a woman creating handmade gifts for wounded soldiers returning home.
Christina Powell folds the red, white and blue quilt before it is packed up and sent to Andrews Air Force Base, some 400 miles away in Maryland.
When Sadako Sasaki lay in her hospital bed sick with leukemia, she showed her father origami cranes from local school girls. "When you fold 1,000 paper cranes, you will get well," her dad responded.
Forget spray-painting crude symbols under the cover of night. Colorful knitters armed with needles and skeins of yarn are unleashing their own brand of colorful guerrilla art to breathe new creativity and spirit into the machismo of urban art.
What's hot off the presses this week?
As a 53-year-old librarian by day and roller derby player by night, Beth Hollis smashes stereotypes and opponents on and off the track.
She's petite, she's middle-aged, she's bookish, and if she gets a chance, she'll knock you on your keister.
Try maneuvering a kayak through icebergs -- big ones, small ones, ones that look like alligators and flat-topped bergs that could spell trouble because they are mostly underwater.
Style has come home to roost in St. Louis. Downtown is experiencing a major revitalization, powered by a brigade of young artists and designers who are giving the area a new lease on life, much like that vintage Chanel handbag you found in your grandmother's attic.
With all the MySpaces and Facebooks and Twitters and so forth out there but only so many hours in the day with which to waste on them, what social networks are the best ones to join?
Thanks to the flu, a broken ankle, a staph infection, and bronchitis, plus several school cancellations, my three children were at home -- hurting, vomiting, coughing, or tracking muddy water into our house -- all but seven days last February. (Shall I pause to let the horror of that number sink in? All but seven.) I'm normally an efficient, organized person who thrives on plans and checklists, but by the end of that month, I'd accomplished almost nothing beyond reading aloud the entire fifth book of Harry Potter. I felt so anxious that I was on the verge of hyperventilation.
Lizzie Cameron is in Musoma, Tanzania working with the Musoma Engineering Project.
As Lizzie prepares to return to Tanzania, she visits London to take part in a charity walk that raises money for the hospital.
Lizzie Cameron is in Musoma, Tanzania working with the Musoma Engineering Project.
Lizzie shows how the LVDC's new program is helping two disabled children.
In a city famous for being the birthplace of the avant-garde, it can be hard to keep up with the latest trends. Here's a rough guide to what's hot right now in the French capital.
Last summer Laura Zander hoped a Makeover would turn Jimmy Beans Wool, the Reno knitting-wool company that she owns with her husband, Doug, into a household name ("Weaving a Web Strategy," July/August 2007). It hasn't happened yet.
Lizzie Cameron is in Musoma, Tanzania working with the Musoma Engineering Project.
Lizzie films local children playing with toys they've crafted from what's left lying around, including plastic bags and toothpaste boxes.
Lizzie Cameron is in Musoma, Tanzania working with the Musoma Engineering Project.
Lizzie gives us an overview of some of her daily chores while in Tanzania, cooking and doing her laundry.
Lizzie Cameron is in Musoma, Tanzania working with the Musoma Engineering Project.
The local youth center is a great place for the disabled children from the Lake Victoria Disability Centre to socialize.
Lizzie Cameron is in Musoma, Tanzania working with the Musoma Engineering Project.
Lizzie and her parents go on an ill-fated safari. Their car gets stuck in the mud and they must wait for help.
Lizzie Cameron is in Musoma, Tanzania working with the Musoma Engineering Project.
It is Nyerere Memorial Day, commemorating Tanzania's first president, who broke tribal boundaries to unify the country.
The 'Call My Name' project was created to honor the forgotten victims of AIDS.
As the room echoes with R&B music, students from Clark Atlanta, Morehouse and Spelman colleges laugh, talk and work on brightly colored pieces of cloth on long tables.
Laura Zander has big plans for her little knitting-supply business. "We want to be a household name," she says. "Every knitter should know about us." It's not the kind of huge ambition she expected to have again when she fled San Francisco in 2001 after the dot-com bust. She and husband Doug Zander landed in tiny Truckee, Calif., where the former Silicon Valley programmers shifted into the slow lane, trading computer skills for goods and services.
Sometime in the next month it will become obvious the New Orleans Hornets are better than their skeptics had imagined. Or so thinks coach Byron Scott.
Ever since eBay announced changes to its feedback rules and fee structure last week, sellers have been irate, exploding onto message boards and blogs with discussions about how the new policies will affect their businesses. But when the idea of a strike was floated, some sellers and buyers decided to get more organized about expressing their displeasure.
If at first you don't succeed ... ask yourself, Am I an otter? A squirrel? A mouse? The answer could spell the difference between things going swimmingly and squeaking to a halt. Find your own winning style.
The hardwood floor will be a replica of the Detroit Pistons court. There will be a Nintendo Wii and a pop-a-shot basket and 16 tickets for children with cancer and their families. "There is a picture of my hand on the wall," says Tayshaun Prince, the Pistons forward who has made all of this happen, "so they can put their hands up against it to see how big they are."
Developing emotional closeness with someone is hard work. Imagine the challenge if there are thousands of miles between you.
When most people talk about printers, they talk about them in terms of printing documents and Web pages, but with more and more high-resolution cameras around, it's becoming more common for people to print large photos at home. If you want those big prints to look nice, that means buying a medium-format printer, such as Canon's Pixma Pro9000.
Even for someone as optimistic as Jeff Bezos, 2006 is turning out to be a hellish year. The Amazon.com founder and e-commerce pioneer saw his second-quarter profit plunge 58 percent, due largely to...
Political refugees flee the worst places on earth to launch businesses in America.
The Scene caught up with Nandita Das to talk street food, handicrafts and the less welcome side of globalization...
Bridge City Tool Works Dozuki Saw $129
The best new hardware made by small businesses.
Bonny Dutton just wanted to stick to her knitting. The single mother of a 2-year-old boy, Dutton (right), 42, runs a children's apparel business called Fleece on Earth from a barn behind her home i...
Steps could have been taken to stop suicide hijackers if Zacarias Moussaoui had leveled with investigators about his al Qaeda ties, a government witness told jurors Wednesday in the penalty phase of Moussaoui's trial.
As a child at the White House, Caroline Kennedy got early lessons in the power of words.
Mena Trott's personal Web log isn't exactly the stuff of headlines. She writes mostly about her daily life -- what she did over the weekend, what's she's reading, what she ate for dinner. Chances are, if she weren't the co-founder of a successful Web log publishing company (Six Apart), her Web log probably wouldn't get much press.
An English design graduate has created a device to help knitters keep track of the number of stitches they have knitted.
Take heart as you embark on your next summer road trip: There are ways to tone down the "are we there yet?" chorus coming from the back seat.
If you were looking for someone to design a better tablesaw, Stephen Gass, 42, would be the perfect candidate. An amateur woodworker who makes home furniture in his free time, Gass also happens to ...
The recent U.S. ban on cigarette lighters aboard passenger planes has caught scores of smokers by surprise at North American airports, but the ban is also making waves globally.
Flat Stanley: successful teacher, world traveler, goodwill ambassador and now Hollywood celebrity. Not bad for a tiny, thin guy made out of paper.
It's been 31 years since the first Michaels (MIK, $30) converted a Ben Franklin five-and-dime into a humble arts-and-crafts store. Today the Irving, Texas, company is a national chain of 842 hobby-...
The term "behind the scenes" will take on a whole new meaning when it comes to describing London Fashion Week in future, as fabrics get more high-tech and science becomes a key part of the business.
Thinking of getting mom something special for Mother's Day but want to move beyond the typical fare?
Bridge clubs are fine by me. Nothing wrong with bowling clubs or knitting clubs. I can even truck with the Hell's Angels, which, its members insist, is a "club," not a gang. Where I draw the line i...
By day, Jerry Fank is a metals man. A machinist by trade, he co-founded Fancort Industries 32 years ago and still serves as vice president of manufacturing. The West Caldwell, N.J., company designs...
Now that the chaos has subsided, people can argue that there was nothing wrong with the concept. It was just lousy execution. Nevertheless, what sounded like a good way to cut costs in 1999 came cl...
So you've finished your basement and now, thanks to all that new space, you find yourself shopping for a pool table. Maybe even an antique one. Go to a dealer in, say, Manhattan, and it can run you...
At a Cincinnati dinner party in 1845, John Brunswick, a Swiss immigrant carriage maker, saw his first billiard table, a British model with dazzlingly ornate details. Brunswick knew little about bil...
Maybe you just want a little extra spending money – or you're trying to catch up with the bills. Some freelance work can go a long way in bridging your personal budget gap. But instead of following the same worn-out job-search track, why not blaze your own creative path?
There is an arithmetic to innovation that seems inescapable--it is repeated again and again in both the business world and the natural world. It is the essence of Silicon Valley. Out of a thousand ...
Look down. It's almost a cinch that whatever you're wearing on your feet wasn't manufactured in America. Of the 1.3 billion pairs of shoes sold annually in the U.S., fewer than one out of 20 is mad...
The U.S. textile industry--5,000 makers of yarns and fabrics, some huge, some tiny, with total sales of $58 billion last year--is astonishingly innovative and productive. The industry spent $2 bill...
Back in 1984, Roxanne Quimby was hitchhiking into town from her home in rural Maine when a yellow pickup, driven by a somber-looking man with a scraggly beard, rolled to a stop. She'd heard the gos...
Back in 1984, Roxanne Quimby was hitchhiking into town from her home in rural Maine when a yellow pickup, driven by a somber-looking man with a scraggly beard, rolled to a stop. She'd heard the gos...
Here's how to cash in on Ralph Lauren's much ballyhooed debut on the New York Stock Exchange in June. First, don't badger your broker for an allotment of shares in the estimated $600 million initia...
Margarita Perez, president of Fortaleza Asset Management, has a knack for finding the stocks of fledgling companies that take off rather than plummet. Her secret? The emerging growth outfits she li...
YOU'D EXPECT a company that returned an average of 54.3% a year to shareholders over the past decade to embody every precept of today's orthodoxy of excellence, right? Yet here's Mark IV Industries...
CROMPTON & KNOWLES How do you revive a company that's hit a wall? Vincent Calarco, 51, faced that challenge when he left his job at Uniroyal in 1985 to head Crompton & Knowles. Although his new com...
ONE YEAR into the Nineties and this is shaping up as the decade in which we came, we saw, and we ran for cover. The economy is wobbling, the Germanys are merging, and the entire world is being held...
Q. Why are comprehensive durable power of attorney instruments, obtained at considerable expense, not honored by many banks and thrifts? Recently, a bank wouldn't honor mine and insisted that its o...
''Nightingales? It's sleazy,'' declares Gail Douglas, taking a drag on her cigarette. An operating-room nurse at Atlanta's Northside Hospital, Douglas, 50, is critiquing last season's controversial...
The wealth of Japanese corporations intrudes on the consciousness of American business executives through a steady stream of small transactions. A Japanese leasing company buys part of a big Americ...
REGINALD F. LEWIS, chairman of TLC Group, smiled to the other passengers as he stepped into the elevator of his Manhattan club. It was a politic smile, since he was carrying a lighted cigar, forbid...
Eight years ago, Neuma Agins, a successful New York City fashion designer, decided to simplify her life by moving to the rural Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts to make her own sweaters. Some simpli...
Isaac Singer started making sewing machines in the U.S. in 1851. These days the company whose products bear his name is called SSMC -- a spinoff from parent Singer Co., which is now devoted solely ...
The company meant sewing machines for 135 years. But in mid-July Singer Co. of Stamford, Connecticut, shed its sewing machine and furniture operations, and stockholders are to get one share in the ...



