a p p a r e n t l y

Part One: Overview

Those of you who have been reading Apparently for some time may recall that the 2009 Renegade Craft Fair sent me into a vitriolic fit. But I’m getting ahead of myself…let me present some context.

In 2008, the first second Renegade Craft Fair was held in Brooklyn. (The RCF itself began on 2003, in Chicago.) Mr. Apparently, Apparently Jr. and I braved the heat and sun of McCarren Park Pool, a defunct pool now used as an event venue, to wander up and down the many rows of crafty goodness. I was stunned and delighted to find so much creativity and talent. Plus they had some excellent cookies for sale, as well as real root beer in glass bottles.

Last year, the fair moved to nearby McCarren Park, and was set up around the circumference of a soccer pitch and running track. Again the day was sweltering, and my compatriots were not quite so pleased. But my excitement and enthusiasm was quickly squelched as I encountered booth after booth of silkscreened t-shirts, onesies and tote bags. I’m not a total crankpot; some of the actual silkscreened images were just lovely. But something about all that screen printing just rubbed me the wrong way. While there’s definitely artistic skill involved, it seemed like a cheap way out, and it left me disappointed.

This year Mr. Apparently wisely sent me off to wander the fair at my leisure, and in the company of an extremely pregnant SuperFastReader, I set a critical, vaguely skeptical eye upon the crafty offerings. And I was pleased with what I saw. Yes, about half of the booths (a loose guesstimate) had silkscreened goods, but the quality of those goods seemed to have improved: organic cottons, bamboo tees, and attractive designs.

The following is an off-the-cuff list of stuff that stuck with me from the fair. In the next post, I’ll feature a couple of my favorite vendors, and in future posts I’ll show off my purchases/acquisitions and offer a few thoughts on what I’ve come to think of as the Craft Fair Dilemma. But for now, What Stood Out This Year:

- Upcycling. Many booths featured clothing made from other clothes. While the pieces were one of a kind, each designer’s booth often had a sort of cohesiveness – for example, a rack of tank dresses in the same silhouette, but made from different colors of jersey knit. Or polyester a-line skirts.

- Hand-sewn handbags. I saw quite a few vendors of these this year, notable also for a small number of patterns executed in a large number of fabrics.

- Not much jewelry, and what I did see was fairly unique: silver rings inlaid with cement, recycled bakelite pieces, artistic metal pendants.

- Expensive dresses that were dry clean only.

- Lots of pretty nature-inspired silkscreening, most of it on t-shirts and some of it on wood. Less hipster-ironic screen printing. This is a good thing.

- BUTTONS. Everyone seemed to have some sort of button for sale. Some of the booths gave away self-promotional pin-back buttons as freebies, while others charged a buck or two for artsy designs. A strangely large percentage of the booths where fabric was used as a raw material also had fabric-covered buttons for sale at relatively exorbitant prices (more on this in my final post). Do people actually pay $10 for three buttons? Really?

Up Next:

Part Two: Favorites and Really Unique Vendors

Part Three: My Purchases

Part Four: Actually Cool Sponsors

and finally Part Five: An Analysis from the Perspective of a Small-Time Artisan, in Which You Might Be Surprised at What I Have to Say. Stay tuned!

image from http://jackson-heights.net/

I have lived in Sunnyside for six of the past eight years, and it’s no secret that this neighborhood offers an amazing array of worldly cuisines, from Indian-inspired Chinese to Japanese-Nepalese and several varieties of South American. What I have always lamented, however, is the complete lack of Vietnamese food. We have multiple Korean joints, numerous places for both decent and cut-rate sushi, and at least half a dozen Chinese takeout storefronts, but no Vietnamese restaurant.

In an attempt to discover more of the world in our own backyard, I opened my trusty copy of Sietsma’s The Food Lover’s Guide to the Best Ethnic Eating in New York City and opted for a Malaysian restaurant just steps from the 7 train at 74th Street. Because this book is somewhat outdated, I looked up this establishment online to make sure it was still in business. The reviews were good and we set off. As you can probably guess, despite my cursory research, Malaysia Rasa Sayang is now a generic-looking Thai restaurant. But not to fear – the very same block offered a Korean BBQ, a Korean-Chinese restaurant, and a pan-Asian place advertising ramen, the mere thought of which had set off my desire for some sort of Asian meal in the first place. We sat down at Prince Hof, but between the blaring music, the tv screens at each booth playing videos, and the lackluster menu, we quickly rose and left.

Then we saw the sign: Thai Son. Don’t be fooled by the name – it’s one of the few Vietnamese-run Vietnamese restaurants in New York, and affiliated with the Thai Son on Baxter Street in Chinatown, where I’ve been several times (although not as frequently as the inimitable Nha Trang Centre, just around the corner). Without any question or even a glance at the menu, we went inside, and it was like visiting an old friend – easy, simple, familiar. In writing this post I’ve come across several lukewarm reviews, but everything we tried was delicious. The calamari was lightly fried in a flavorful batter, the cha gio stuffed with fresh pork, and Mr Apparently’s pan-fried noodles spot on. Vaguely pursuing the desire for ramen, I skipped my standard order of grilled pork over vermicelli for a bowl of chicken pho and asked for egg noodles instead of rice noodles. The bowl of soup was arguably the best pho I’ve had in New York. Perhaps I should have been eating chicken all this time (although that’s a topic for another post), or perhaps Thai Son just makes a fine bowl of noodles; regardless, it’s a quick subway ride away and we’ll be going back.

Since Mr. Apparently had a rare Monday holiday, we left the house early and took the bus to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 10am is a perfect time for museum-going; no waiting in line, the halls are sparsely populated, and you’re ready for a snack before the lunchtime rush.

Our destination in the modern art wing? Charles Demuth’s The Figure Number 5 in Gold, a lovely painting in its own right and appealing to Apparently, Jr for its role as the model for a watch he and his father presented to me on Valentine’s Day. Only through a strange series of gallery closings, restroom detours, and chance did we stumble upon the one open modern art gal
lery today, and there it was: Demuth’s brilliant homage to William Carlos Williams. Can you see the fire engine?

After all this excitement, A Jr. fell sound asleep on the downtown bus, and no amount of transferring or being carried home in his father’s arms could wake the exhausted little bug. I couldn’t be more pleased that art makes him happy.

 

 

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.