MV Fiber Farm on Spinning Wool into Yarn

I may know a good deal about yarn, but I don't know much about how yarn is made other than sheep --> spindle --> skein --> shop.

This fantastic set of photos from Martha's Vineyard Fiber Farm shows exactly what happens to a fleece when it goes to the mill. And what a lovely old mill it is, too, with lots of antique equipment and not even a digital scale in sight.

photo from fiberfarm.com/2009/06/field-trip

Has the Renegade Craft Fair Jumped the Shark?

Last year, I loved the Renegade Craft Fair, a huge get-together of over 200 independent crafty types who congregated in (the empty) McCarren Park Pool on a searing hot weekend to sell their nifty wares. It's sponsored in part and heavily promoted by Etsy, an online marketplace made up of individual crafters (including yours truly, who as of this writing has made exactly one sale). The Fair's site proclaims that the offerings include "DIY knitting, jewelry, sewn items, paper goods, silkscreening, comics, zines and more!"

The fair has been expanding and adding locations every year since 2003, and it's truly a marvelous thing to see. The maze-shaped layout in the pool was perfect for meandering around, returning to booths and finding the refreshment trucks with ease.

This year, however, the Fair expanded to the perimeter of the park itself, along with some 35 booths-worth of overflow into the next-part-of-the-park-over, and with over 300 vendors it was just unmanageable. The layout was a huge square, and it was practically impossible to browse, make a mental (or even written) note of one's favorites and then return to a few booths to purchase. In addition, the vast number of silkscreened tee-shirts/onesies/aprons lent the whole Fair a homogeneous feel that I'm sure was not what the organizers intended.

The economics of craft fairs suck, and I'll be the first in line to tell you that it's impossible to sell fully hand-crafted goods at a price that even begins to cover your time. I have nothing against silkscreen; in fact, I even took an Etsy Labs silkscreening workshop last year. It's fun and you can create beautiful things. Once you've created your art and burned your screen you can make multiple prints with an ease that starts to make the financial numbers work, especially for a simple, one-color design. I'm not surprised that people silkscreen stuff to sell; I'm surprised that the Fair selected so many vendors with incredibly similar wares.

As a friend noted, when the fair is that huge, and so many of the offerings look pretty much the same, it's actually a more pleasant experience to do one's shopping from the comfort of one's own home, on Etsy.