My friends Lisa and Jonah visited me at Handmade Mart this past weekend, where I was selling my crafty stuff. It was a really well attended show that brought in a brand new crowd of shoppers.
Sometimes I feel bad when my friends come out to see me at a show because I worry that they [...]

The American Craft Council show in Baltimore is huge.  I mean really, really huge.  With 3 days and over 700 craft vendors, craft sensory overload is common.  Hello Craft was fortunate to have the on-site aid of shoppers who stopped by our booth to share their hard-sought, handmade finds.
Here, in ACC Baltimore Part 1, I’ll [...]

In 2000 I stumbled upon the work of Dutch artist Hella Jongerius in a magazine. At the time I had recently started teaching myself to work with clay and was stuck in a very commercial and static mindset. Her embroidered porcelain dishware definitely gave me a moment of “joyous jealousy”. Jongerius takes a historically functional [...]

Talk Shop is the series where we interview independent store owners from across the country, to get their inside take on running an independent business that supports the handmade community.
In this Talk Shop, Jamie Chan, one half of the husband and wife team who owns Urban Fauna Studio, talks about her one-of-a-kind green craft boutique [...]

The holiday version of Portland’s Crafty Wonderland took place earlier this month amid a wintery mix of low temperatures and snowy-sleety rain. Holiday shoppers were not detoured with over 200 lined up, steamy drinks in hand, before the doors had opened. The show featured the finest makers from the Pacific Northwest and beyond. To [...]

This was originally posted at http://meganauman.blogspot.com/ and is
re-posted with permission. Follow the lively discussion on the original post.
Last year, along with ten thousand other people, I happily signed the Buy Handmade pledge. Then came the stress and the guilt. Some of my family made following the rules easy. I gave my jewelry or jewelry made [...]

The British are crafting!  The British are crafting!
Ready for another invasion from our friends on the other side of the Atlantic?  Not a hostile takeover like the Red Coats arriving on our shores, think more along the lines of the Beatles coming to America.  This is a cultural exchange that you don’t even have to [...]