Rijks Museum Library | by michael_d_beckwith
Resources Compilation
The Brooklyn Refinery aims to share with you resources and inspiration for arts, crafts, and DIY projects. We especially want to let you know about free and low-cost resources.
Below are links to some posts we’ve written about resources such as images, instructions, patterns, inspiration for projects, and online courses.
Three American art museums - the Guggenheim, Met, and Getty Museums - have gifted us all with free access to their collections of art books. We can build our own online libraries of art books and exhibition catalogs, or just browse for ideas and inspiration.
Listed are links to museum collections of quilts, textiles, folk art, fiber arts, contemporary crafts, handicrafts, weaving, wood works, ceramics, pottery, and glassworks, including the American Craft Council's list of museums which collect and show contemporary American crafted items.
In the past few years, many museums, libraries, and corporate collections have uploaded photo libraries online and made them available to the public. Some have even made their images open to public domain use, with free downloads. This blog post includes links of entities where you’re welcome to search their databases for art and craft images.
Available for free on The Graphics Fairy are vintage stock images, antique graphics, illustrations, vintage printables, and old pictures that are in the public domain. You can search by themes such as children, advertising, wedding, flowers, postcards, travel, garden, animal, retro, maps, botanicals, natural history, and many more.
In addition to the graphics, this site offers instructions for DIY/craft projects. Many of these projects involve transferring her site’s graphic images onto objects – glass jars, coffee mugs, fabric, and furniture.
Within an easily searchable site, you'll have access to over 34,000 magazines. (Please note: some of the magazines are NSFW!) You can find knitting magazines which have been digitized, where you can search for knitting, crocheting, and needlework patterns, as well as related articles from 1800 through to 2018.
We list 22 websites offering free knitting and crocheting patterns. Some offer thousands of patterns.
A few of these sites are connected to fiber arts stores or yarn manufacturing companies. They offer free patterns, but they also sell patterns, yarn, tools, and kits online. Some of the websites also have youtube channels with free tutorials.
Free Papercraft Printables for Kids
This blog post lists six sites which give you access to origami, coloring pages, villages, puppets, dolls, scrapbooking items, and many more.
This blog post outlines charities which are looking for knitted and sewn items, and where to find charitable craft groups which you can join.
We link to three of our favorite free knitting instruction sites.
Instructables is a site which offers many free short courses/instructions for making an eclectic range of crafts and DIY projects.
POPULAR POSTS
 Follow a tutorial for making a patchworked bag with Sashiko topstitching. |  Follow tutorials for how to create traditional Japanese embroidery stitching. |  Explore a library's digitized vintage maps, which you can download for free. |  Learn from a museum textile curator how to best care for your quilts. |
 Learn to make a basket weave pattern quilt from scraps of fabric. |  Sisters Lorna and Jill Watt create amazing yarn bomb installations . |  Ceramic artists create fantastical structures using magnetic clay. |  Learn about a Viking fabric-making technique which pre-dates knitting. |
 Follow a tutorial for making a bilum bag - PNG's traditional fabric. |  Learn to make a pinhole camera; develop paper film with common items. |  Learn about a stretchy fabric made with connected loops. |  Free digitized knitting magazines 1800 - now. |