I specifically avoided Origin, The Craft Council’s annual event this year. The flagship UK Craft event left me feeling a bit cold last time I went in 2006. I thought it was a tad too upmarket and whilst there was a lot of great work on display it felt a bit like a gallery or actually a museum. It felt dead. Not a lot of ‘disruption’ going on. And in this way I believe Origin mimics the notion of Craft by the powers that be at the Crafts Council in the UK. To them Craft is undertaken by a privileged artistic few and the arbiters of quality are the gallery curators. It feels like a rather stuffy ‘club’. I can understand why it is so. Before the internet power and decision making was often confereed to the few. It wasn’t well distributed. But now we have the internet we’ve got the ability to ‘filter’. If flickr can enable amateur photographers to compete with professionals (and many photographs, actually ‘snapshots’, taken by the unwashed have been used for commercial purposes from flickr) and at the same time encourage the take up of the practice and craft of phtography then surely the same can be true of Craft, of making nice ‘things’. Etsy has done a great job to encourage craft, particularly in the US, and I’m hoping that we can cause a bit of disruption here too.

So, rant over, I’d like to ask you what you think of when you think of ‘Craft’? This is partly in response to this question “The word craft is misused, misunderstood and misplaced. It is used in ways that diminish its credibility” which I came across on the forum of the Craft Scotland site.

NB: for a good overview of the neat stuff at Origin see treehugger’s coverage.

So, a few of you have seen the wonderful display in howies. Amidst all the Folksy stuff that was shortlisted is our logo in wood. A chap called Fin made this. We found Fin by trawling through the vast (like 3!) listings for wood carvers and sculpters in and around Yorkshire. He wasn’t one of them but was recommended by them and we quickly discovered why; he’s good.

He works out of a studio above a greasy cafe near the train station. This unsavoury (see what I did…) exterior is great because you don’t then expect to find yourself in this cavernous space chock full of wood and machines and stuff. The sort of place that makes you feel like a child, where you just want to play. It’s been one of the great ‘ups’ of doing Folksy, meeting lots of people who make things and are skilled and talented in a way that you don’t usually see (at least if you’re used to office life like I am). Anyway, we weren’t allowed to play so we thought we’d show you a little bit about “how” Fin made the logo (the time lapse starts after a brief interview where Fin talks about why he made it like he did):

If that was all a bit too fast then you can see the output here:

And here is the time lapse on it’s own:

The logo is currently in the howies store and will probably end up in our London back office as they tend to get a better class of visitor than our Sheffield office, although the staff aren’t nearly so good :o

nb. It should be noted that the actual logo was created by LOVE in Manchester who we ocassionally work with. A belated thank you to Emma, Adam and Alf over there (waves)

We were at Interesting2007 today, the day were were hoping to launch a beta beta or rough, rough or half-baked or whatever version of the service. However, we had a few teething problems and the beta beta [or… ] will have to wait a week or so. Still, ‘Interesting’ was excellent. Freakish weather meant Rob and Debs didn’t get to London until 11am – when the conference started – so I [James] leant on Gabriel [Gabriel, thank you!] who was fabulous in helping me create the “craft concept retail space” in the gloomy oak lobby of the Conway Hall.

We set up our stall trying to create a living room environment which kinda worked, but what did work was our “make table” where we beavered away making blinkybugs [see below] and Rob being far more technical hacked a Nintendo controller to make an optical mouse and also made an “ambient orb light” which responded to ‘the internet’. What about the internet it was responding has not yet become clear.

Anyway, we had a great time, got lots of good feedback, not to mention loads of beta testers and a possible invite to do a big festival event this summer and I got to have a brief chat with Matthew D’Ancona [albeit unwittingly] which was marvelous. Thanks Russell :) and thanks to all those crafters who helped us to provide goods for the event [Lucia, Alice, Zoe, etc…].

As Russell mentioned we’re going to be running a craft stall @ interesting2007. June 16th. It’s good to have a line drawn in the sand: it makes you focus. And we need to focus not only on the techy stuff but also on the audience. One of the things [amongst many] we’ve been slightly neglectful of in recent months is nurturing what you may call the “early adopter” craft folks. We know quite a few and consulted some on the process of designing the service but, well, we need to know more. So if you know anyone who makes stuff, interesting stuff that they care about, then please mention Folksy and get them to ping us because we’d love to hear from them, especially those in the UK. We have around 5 crafters represented on the stall but we want a lot more to make it eclectic.

We’ve recently been talking to people at Persistence Works in Sheffield [you see what they did there… nice] who were great, the Craft Centre in Manc and are doing a tour of studios and degree shows in the next month or so to see who’s who and what’s what. Any suggestions?