So this is the home of all the Handmade Festival's progress, ideas, updates, a forum for artists. I've been dreaming of this for a while now, and I'm excited to get the ball rolling on what I hope will be an annual event.
The Idea for the Handmade festival began just after my daughter was born and I met a bunch of amazing women who were crafting from home, in between, holding, bouncing, burping and working. Most were art students who had shuffled off into some other job because crafting at home just wasn't viable. Over the years I have met more and more people doing the same thing, but now with the invent of Etsy, and people like Amanda Soule http://www.soulemama.com/ who are spearheading a resurgence of the cottage industry it suddenly is viable to be at home, and create a business from your house, But this of course is not a new idea. There is a particularly large sect of the population in london who are older crafters, people with a ton of experience hiding in different guilds, crafting for charity, church sales and family, and once upon a time the Western Fair hosted a building for everyone to come together and show their work, but I think this was scrapped in favour of an "Eco" building, and now there are little pockets of very skilled people, and I would love to tap into that, open the door, and have us all come together in hopes of passing down, sharing, understanding the history and creating new skills and relationships amongst these amazing artists.
