By: Marianne Amoss

On a cold, crisp Saturday in December, the hall of the First Unitarian Church in Mount Vernon was filled with people. Tables lined the walls, and more than twenty vendors sold their wares. Everything was handmade—T-shirts, scarves and gloves, greeting cards, jewelry, handbags, even stuffed monsters—and everyone was in good spirits.

This was the first Holiday Art Mart held by local T-shirt company Squidfire. “Every city has a signature craft event,” says Jean-Baptiste Regnard, who co-owns Squidfire with designer Kevin Sherry. “There’s Crafty Bastards in Washington, D.C., Bust magazine’s Holiday Craftacular in Brooklyn, New York, and the Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago and Brooklyn. We thought, why didn’t Baltimore have one of these things?”

Regnard isn’t alone in his interest in crafting (which can be distinguished from DIY, a similar movement, by the fact that “craft” is always handmade; DIY projects can be anything from publishing books to writing website code). Nationally, groups like the Church of Craft have formed in major cities to give crafters, who usually work solo, a chance to share ideas, advice, and camaraderie. Locally, small groups are gathering in shops and homes across the city to make things with their hands. Craft kits, magazines, and books are popping up in local boutiques, and websites dedicated to the subject are all over the Internet. Crafting has become hip again.

The current interest in craft seems to be similar to the Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the twentieth century. As a reaction to increased dependence on machinery, caused by the Industrial Revolution, some people began to wish for a return to the handmade. Most members of the Arts and Crafts movement believed that machinery could be useful if applied conscientiously, to complement handwork. But to replace completely the human hand, they thought, took all the joy out of the act of making something. For them, the creative process was paramount.

Like the Arts and Craft-ers, we have also lived through the beginning of a new century and are now relying on technology to make everyday tasks easier. We also have the sneaking suspicion that many of these gadgets and devices seem to take a lot of the humanity out of our daily lives. One major difference between modern times and the turn of the twentieth century is that not all of our technology is of the soul-sucking variety. Some of it proves quite useful. Ellen Lupton, founding director of the master of fine arts graphic design program at Maryland Institute College of Art and curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, believes that the recent interest in crafts has come about because the Internet has democratized the creative process.

“In this moment in history, people feel very empowered and equipped to make and do things on their own,” Lupton says. “Knowledge is more available than ever before.”

Even in the graphic design field, which is by nature based in computer technology, Lupton sees an interest in the handmade. “Students are well-equipped technologically, but they are fascinated with sewing, carving, printing by hand, and making rubber stamps,” she says. “So much about what is happening in the design world is about combining the digital with the physical. It’s about infusing the digital language with something human and something made.”

More traditional crafts are also becoming popular. In Baltimore, knitting classes and groups, like Atomic Knit Night, are popular. Atomic Books and Atomic Pop co-owner Rachel Whang started the weekly knitting group about four years ago by advertising in her boyfriend’s blog (www.mobtownshank.com). She has carried crafting kits, books, and magazines for years. “I started slipping in the knitting books when Stitch ’n Bitch came out [in 2003], and the response was great. It’s just grown from there,” she says. Now, Atomic Pop has devoted a section of its store to craft kits, books, and supplies, and the Knit Night is still going strong, with numbers of knitters ranging from eight to twenty-five.

If you’d rather buy than make something handmade, you can find plenty of purveyors of the handmade online on websites like Etsy.com. Realizing that eBay was not the best place for crafters to sell their creations, Rob Kalin and three colleagues launched Etsy in 2005 as a marketplace strictly for one-of-a-kind, handmade items.

Kalin, a woodworker, has always been interested in craft. Things made by hand, he says, show the human touch, and that’s hard to ignore. When he moved out of his Brooklyn apartment, Kalin says, “I got rid of ninety-five percent of what I own. I made piles of stuff to donate, to sell, to give away, and to keep. If anything was mass-produced, it was easy to put it in the give-it-away pile. Things that are handmade have a whole other layer of meaning on them—there’s a story behind them. That was the stuff I couldn’t give away.”

Kalin’s not alone. Now, about two years after the launch of Etsy, shoppers are purchasing several thousand products per day (at the beginning, the site sold about ten items per day); more than 307,000 items  have sold through the site so far.

Crafters are also snapping up publications devoted to the culture. One of these, Make magazine, was launched in 2004 by Dale Dougherty and California-based O’Reilly Media. Dougherty has worked in book and magazine publishing for twenty years. The quarterly magazine encourages people to explore technology and tweak it to fit their needs, by profiling interesting people and things and offering step-by-step instructions for projects.

The first issue of Make—45,000 copies—sold out, leading to two additional press runs to produce another 30,000 copies. Now, two years after its launch, Make has a paid circulation of 85,000, and the first issue of its sister publication, Craft, has just been released to cater to those more interested in crafting than, say, building a camcorder rocket (which can be found in volume 7 of Make). Craft’s inaugural release of 30,000 copies is almost gone, according to Dougherty.

These publications, kits, and websites that espouse the crafting lifestyle don’t just provide blueprints for certain projects—they encourage people to create their own usable items. ReadyMade, another popular magazine with a crafting bent, published a book of projects called How to Make (Almost) Everything: A Do-It-Yourself Primer in late 2005. The introduction reads, “Think of each project as a pit stop in the creative process, not a final destination. We fully expect you to get behind the wheel, floor it, and go places we never knew existed.”

One caveat: Going to these places sure is fun and rewarding, but it’s not cheap. One other thing our current culture has in common with the milieu of the Arts and Crafts movement is that in both cases, a middle class with disposable income and spare time existed. Crafting is currently a more-than $30 billion industry, according to the Craft and Hobby Association, and crafters spend about $26.30 per project.

“Crafting is a big industry, and sewing your own clothes isn’t necessarily cheaper than buying stuff that was made in a sweatshop,” says Lupton. “But it’s more satisfying, and it’s yours.”
 


—Marianne Amoss is Urbanite’s Editor.



Flex your creative muscles with this craft project.

WATER-BOTTLE CHANDELIER
from How to Make (Almost) Everything: A Do-It-Yourself Primer

9 glass bottles
9 pre-wired light receptacles
9 lightbulbs
Electrical tape
2 power strips
Large ceiling eye hook (to mount overhead)
Plastic tie

TOOLS
Bottle-cutter kit (runs about $50 at a craft or hobby shop)
Wire cutter
Wire stripper
Glass plate (you will use this to sand down your cut glass)
Candle
Matches
Ice cubes
Kitchen towel

1. Remove caps, rinse out the bottles, and let them air-dry.
2. Set up the bottle cutter and determine how long you want your pendant to be. Make sure you have
a solid end guide for the bottle when you rotate it on the cutter so your etch line will connect. We used a small, heavy box.
3. Using both hands, rotate a bottle in one continuous motion, applying even pressure throughout the rotation for best result. 
4. Light the candle. Remove the bottle from the cutter and hold the etch line above the lit candle to heat the cut.
5. Slowly rotate the etch line above the flame in a continuous motion to apply even heat. If it gets too hot, you will hear the bottle crack. If you don’t heat it up enough, the glass won’t break off as described in the next two steps. This is a trial-and-error part of the process that depends on the thickness of your glass.
6. Remove the bottle from the candle heat and apply an ice cube directly along the circumference of the etch line, letting it drip over the towel.
7. The end of your bottle should break off by itself from the change in temperature. If not, using the towel, hold the end that needs to break off and gently twist. It should come off easily. (If it doesn’t, dry off the bottle and repeat steps 5 through 7.)
8. Wipe the end of the cut bottle and set aside.
9. Repeat steps 3 through 8 for each of your bottles.
10. Set your small glass plate on a level surface and sprinkle about a teaspoon of the carbide polishing powder that came with your kit and 1/4 teaspoon of water onto the glass plate.
11. Set the cut side of one of the bottles down on the glass plate.
12. Rotate the cut side to the flat of the glass in a figure-8 motion. The polishing powder and the water, combined with the rotating grind, sands the cut glass into a smoother edge. This process is very loud and will take about three to five minutes per bottle.
13. Wipe the bottle edge clean and set aside.
14. Repeat steps 11 through 13 for all the bottles.
15. Because the plug end of the light socket will not fit through the mouth of the bottle, you will have to cut the wire (preferrably closer to the plug end).
16. Feed the cut end attached to the socket through the bottom of the glass pendant and up through the bottle’s mouth.
17. Next, strip both cut ends of the wire, reattach, and wrap with electrical tape for a secure, safe connection.
18. Plug it in to see if it works.
19. Repeat steps 15 through 18 for the rest of the bottles.
20. Once you have all the sockets threaded through the bottles, arrange, and use a twist tie to hold the electrical cords together.
21. Secure to your ceiling hook, plug in the chandelier, and enjoy a glass of high-class water.

Reprinted from ReadyMade by Shoshana Berger and Grace Hawthorne. Copyright © 2005. Published by Clarkson Potter, a division of Random House, Inc.


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