Craft Lake City Festival Artisans, Craft Foodies and Vintage Vendors

Posted May 20, 2013

We are excited to announce the 2013 Craft Lake City DIY Festival Artisans, Craft Foodies and Vintage Vendors!

2 Dots Over the i
58bluebirds
A Glass Thumb
Abuse of Reason Art
Alexis Mattox Design
Alexis Rausch
Alyana Kay
Amelia Prime
America’s Sign Kitchen
Ande Monster Vintage
Andy Joy Chase
Annika Quinn
ARDOR
artianguis
Bagavond
Bagsy Blue Co.
Balm of Gilead
Beehive Soap and Body Care LLC
Better Than Mud
Black Whale Emporium
Blake Palmer
Blue Copper Roasters
Bolt Lighting
Bottlegoround
Broadway Art & Salvage
Buffluca
Bug And CC wearables
Bullets & Bees Boutqiue
Butterbean Leather Co.
Candace Jean Andersen
Candy Everything
Cat Palmer
Charming Beard Coffee (Formerly Known as La Barba)
Chill Custom Accessories
Chris Bodily
Chris Madsen
Circles and Stones
Citrus Spice Bakery
Clifford & Sons MFG.
Copper Palate Press
Crow SLC
Cup and Cake Art
DaMar Enterprises, LLC dba Grandma Sacilian Sauce
Darling Ephemera
Denik
Derek Dyer
Desarae Lee
Desert Rose Jewelry
Dolce Bella by Erin
Eleanor Scholz
eleven19
Elizabeth Q Designs
Emily Elizabeth’s Designs
Emily Palmer
Ernest Gentry Ceramics
Evan Jed Memmott
Evie Ivy
Explore Utah Science
Foodies From Logan, LLC dba Butcher’s Bunches
Freshly Picked
Frosty Darling
Galen Schuck
GEEKLEETIST
GLITTERGUTTERGLAMOUR
Gregory Nelson
Hands of Industry
Hannah Rose Design
Hazey May’s Creations
Heath Montgomery Pottery
Heather Ackley Art
hello maypole
hook’d crochet
House of Tenebris
IHSQUARED
Imperiale Forge
Ingredients For Lovely
Ink Run Press
Isabell’s Umbrella
Jellabee
Jelly Bean Cards
JessicaJane
Jewell Loveless
Jonathon B Illustration
Jorge Arellon
Joshua Flicker
K aRtwork
Kat Martin
Kathleen Carricaburu
Ker-ij Jewelry
Koolmono
Kumiko’s Origami Jewelry
ladybug&babybird
Lars Love Letters
Lass Studio
Laura Frisk
Lauren Mack
Leia Bell
Lily Jane
Logan Eileen
Marcee Blackerby
Marie Rawlings
Mary Anne Loveless
Meg Frampton
MEGAN SQUARED
Metalhead Jewelry Design
Michelle Christensen
Mike Murdock
MILLCREEK APOTHECARY
Mineral + Matter
Miss Fitts Up-cycled treasures
MKM Handiwork
Monster Patch
Monster Socks
Most Adoringly
Mountain Mehndi
MXW Clothing
My Rusted Roots
Nic Annette Miller
Nicholas Swan
Nick Boyer
Nicole Choules
NiftySwank
Noisette
Oak Street Press
Old News Records
Omitted Youth
P.U.N.A.
Paper Wasp
Pattern Daily Prints
Peach Treats, LLC
Peck’s Vanilla
Penny Jones Found Art
Pink Bus Gallery
Presto Print
Radseams
Robin Banks
Salt City Emporium
Salt Lake City Public Library
Sarah Safavi Jewelry
Say Hello
ScatterbrainTees
Shirley Jackson
Silverschmidt Jewelry
Skivvies Inc.
SLC Downtown Master Plan
SLC Photo Collective LLC
SoloFlair
Sorry Clementine
Soused
Spa Secrets 4 U
Spotted Hippo Soap, LLC
Spy Hop
Stacie Van Arsdale
Steampunk Bijoux
Stitched Cards
Street Bauble
Subin’s Hand Carved Soap Art
Sugar Skull Designs
Sweet Janes
Sweet Kiwi Crochet
Tattooed Tinker Studio
Terry’s Tinker Shop
The Bean Whole
The Chocolate Conspiracy
The Cotton Floozy
The Furry Chocolate
The Green Canary
The Land of Salt
The Mandate Press
The Pink Raffy
The Rose Establishment
The Spirit of the Tree
The Westfold Bandits
Thy Doan
Tiger Medicine
Timmland Studios
Tommy Dolph
Travis Gray
Trendymayan, LLC.
Trent Call
Trisha McBride
unhinged
Utah Children’s Theatre
Velo City Bags
Veronica Perez
Vintage Fern
Vinylicious Designs
Walls of Text
Wasatch Organics
Wavecloud Jewelry
You’re A Doll, Narwhal
Zaxworx

We are looking forward to another amazing year at the Gallivan Center for Craft Lake City’s 5th annual DIY Festival on August 9th & 10th.

Applications for DIY engineers, commercial food vendors, food trucks, performers and buskers are still open! They will be accepted until June 17, 2013 and announced Sunday, June 23, 2013 via twitter. Participants in these categories will be listed on http://craftlakecity.com/ the following day.

Crafting a DIY Community

Posted April 24, 2013

You could accurately say I’m a generally artistic person, creative, visually motivated, and drawn to good design in any medium. However, I consider myself only a casual crafter. By that I mean to say I don’t have one particular craft I’ve focused on, perfected, and practice consistently in my spare time (i.e. signs of a non-casual crafter, see also: artisan). I do admit to an obsession with pretty paper and washi tape. I compulsively buy stacks and stacks and rolls and rolls. I make greeting cards every so often. These infrequent flurries have been the extent of my crafty manifestations.

Enter Craft Lake City, my DIY spirit guides.

Much like my foray into the world of crafting, I was peripherally familiar with this hip nonprofit org. I’d been to their summer festival, I flip through SLUG, I try to live/shop as locally as possible and engage with the most interesting bits of my city. And yet it wasn’t until I attended my first Craft Lake City workshop that I experienced the profound communal aspect of all this do-it-yourself energy.

I bake potluck cookies and show up to my fair share of crafternoons hosted by my girl friends . This was different. There was something electric, almost subversive, in the act of gathering around a table with complete strangers and creating something unique, together. I say “subversive” because the paradox of our hyper connected culture is that we aren’t really connecting with each other at all. With a flick of my finger on an iPhone screen I’m connected to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr, Yelp, Blogger, LinkedIn, Gmail, etc. etc. ad nauseum. I run this exact cycle of connectivity every day, multiple times a day, but when was the last time I started a conversation with a complete stranger? Let alone create and laugh and spend hours with them. In the same moment that these workshops are a return to simpler times, they are also a radical act of subverting a culture that tells you to go go go it alone. I dig that.

I also respect the attention Craft Lake City pays to the local economy. Local First Utah recently published a study that shows “locally owned retailers return 52% of their revenues to the local economy. For comparison purposes, national chain retailers return just 14% of revenues. That means every dollar spent at a locally owned, independent business returns almost four times more to the local economy than a dollar spent at a national chain retailer” (read the full study).

The artists who sell handmade crafts at their summer festival are the same who teach the workshops. Also, the workshops themselves are hosted by local shops. I’m not a sewer (seamstress? one who sews?) and have only window shopped the beautiful Tissu Fine Fabrics store on Pierpont Avenue. If it weren’t for the Craft Lake City workshop held there, in support of their locally-owned neighbor, I may never have gone in. I may never have Instagrammed photos of the beautiful space. I may never have referred three friends to the shop who saw the photos and who do sew. When you’re intentional about building local economic networks, the impact is exponential. Monetarily and culturally exponential. It’s beautiful.

It goes beyond economics for me. My career, my nearly-long-forgotten grad school thesis, and my life in general is focused on organizing and building communities. Yes, hence me getting all preachy and stuff about the meta politics of water bottle tote workshops. The point is that now more than ever we need spaces like this. Now more than ever we need time for creative, communal experiences like this. Craft Lake City is creating that space. Casual crafters and artisans alike are making the time. We’re gathering with strangers and creating far more than handmade journals and dreamcatcher necklaces. We’re creating a culture. We’re creating our version of Salt Lake City. Join us.

Gail Jessen makes colorful memories through travel, photography, design, food, and cultural adventures. She is a higher ed administrator by day and a creative soul in real life. She blogs at my madeleines and Instagrams as @fourthirtyam.

CRAFT LAKE CITY AWARDED BEST OF STATE!

Posted April 10, 2013

The Craft Lake City DIY Festival was awarded 2013 Best of State award for Fairs, Festivals and Events!

August 2013 will mark the fifth year of the Craft Lake City DIY Festival, which was started in 2009 by Anglea H. Brown, Editor and Publisher of SLUG Magazine.

The organization believes Utah’s unique crafting history and cultural background provides a fertile foundation for the local alternative arts community to grow and flourish, and seeks to strengthen and support it through various activities. Craft Lake City facilitates local arts and crafts throughout the year, providing artists of all mediums with the chance to promote themselves and their work, and also educates the community on the local Do-it-Yourself (DIY) culture through workshops, demonstrations, gallery shows, science and technology events and fundraisers.

Since 2009, Craft Lake City has hosted the largest DIY Festival in Utah. In 2012, over 15,000 people attended. Craft Lake City is excited to announce that the annual DIY gathering will be expanding into a two-day format on Friday, August 9 and Saturday, August 10, 2013 at the Gallivan Center. For more information, visit craftlakecity.com.

Love Utah Give Utah

Posted March 19, 2013

On Friday, March 22, Craft Lake City will be taking part in the Love UT Give UT event! Over 400 charity organizations from around the state will take part in a 24-hour fundraising marathon in an effort to help out non-profit organizations in need, as well as giving the community an opportunity to support local causes.

As part of the event on March 22, Craft Lake City will be holding an in-person donation drive from 11am-1pm on in front of our offices on Pierpont Avenue (240 South between 300 and 400 West). The first 50 people to donate $25 or more will receive a $10 certificate for a free meal from theLewis Bros. Food Truck, who took part in the 2012 festival as part of the craft foods area providing their own take on burgers, fries and other specialty treats.

Read up more on the fundraiser on Craft Lake City’s donation page:http://loveutgiveut.razoo.com/story/Craft-Lake-City

Check out Craft Lake City on KSL!

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=1105&sid=24447040&title=love-utah-give-utah-helps-local-nonprofits

Doctor Who? Exactly!

Posted March 13, 2013

Doctor Who is one of the most polarizing shows in pop culture. Fans love it for being the ultimate adventure show where the lead character can travel through time and space to save the universe four-hundred times over. Critics ridicule it for being overly-complicated and too cheeky for its own good as a British export. No matter what your personal view is on the series, chances are that at some point as a kid you happened to flip past PBS and caught a rerun of the classic series from the ’70s staring Tom Baker and his ridiculously long scarf.

The Fourth Doctor, as he’s known by fans (played by Tom Baker), had several variations of a patterned-scarf that he wore most everywhere he went. The scarf was created by mistake when a costume designer for the show asked knitter Begonia Pope to make one using the yarn they were given, and she inadvertently knitted a twenty-foot scarf using ALL the yarn. In that moment, geek culture would be given one of the longest running symbols of fan appreciation to date. with a following so big, there are websites dedicated to it with instructions on how to make your own. Being a fan myself, I wanted one! But I can’t knit. Lucky for me, Salt Lake City has a vast geek community with great crafting talents, which led me to my friend Stacey Gray, who was willing to knit me one for my personal collection.

Gray had become a fan through the more recent seasons, and was immediately shown the scarf and those websites by her brother once she was hooked. On the crafting side, she had a lifelong interest in knitting going back to the blankets her grandmother made, but had only recently taken up the art herself.

“My brother has been wanting Tom Baker’s scarf since he got into it,” says Stacey. “This past summer, I finally learned how to knit just so he would stop bothering me about it. In the course of my research on his scarf, I found the pattern for this one, and decided to learn how to crochet with it.”

The scarf itself has an abnormal thread count and color pattern, depending on which variation you find online, not to mention specific colors for the truly obsessed fan. The specific pattern used on mine doesn’t come out to twenty when knitted. In fact, this one is only eleven feet upon completion, which is perfectly fine because even when it’s double-wrapped around my head and going down my body, it still almost hits the floor on both ends. Gray herself used her phone to compare colors of yarn at Joanns.

When I asked Stacey about the process of making it, she boiled it down to simply being a series of knots.

“You decide how wide you want the scarf, then you crochet and count rows and follow the pattern. When it comes time to switch colors, you drop the old color from your hand, and start using the new color as if it’s the old one. Then, BAM! New stripe. I made it on TRAX and at work, so I was constantly picking it up and putting it down. It probably took me about 40 hours.”

Suffice it to say, once I received my scarf for Christmas, I was adoring it. The scarf itself is very warm, which has been a plus in the winter months where we had temperatures in single digits, and long enough to wrap around the body. Plus, it is kinda cool to see how many people are fans when they recognize just a portion of the pattern. Like a Star Trek insignia or Ninja Turtles mask, that scarf will forever be a childhood conversation starter.

For anyone looking to get a Doctor Who scarf made by Stacey, she can’t say with certainty that it will happen right away, as she’s currently working on her senior thesis with a full-time job, but if you’re willing to wait and have the cash, the price for yarn (not including labor) is $10-$40, depending on how long it takes her. You can reach her through Google voice at (385) 202-3863.

For those of you looking to DIY your own version, visit DoctorWhoScarf.com for more details and information.