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  • April Gavin

Winter Craft Fair


Greetings, I'll be vending at the Ecology Center's winter craft fair in Berkeley on three consecutive Saturdays - December 8th, 15th, and 22nd. I will have blank journals for sale as well as super useful and attractive zippered pouches. I invite all of you to swing by and visit. The craft fair is held during the usual Saturday farmer's market (rain or shine) on Center street between Milvia and Martin Luther King. Here are some samples of what will be available:

These two are examples of up-cycled denim that I received from Anne Mendenhall vis-a-vis someone in her guild de-stashing ideas on up-cycled denim. Thanks to that person I made a lot of kids happy last summer at Camp 510 and was able to create about 23 denim pouches.

Finished size on most of these is approximately 5" x 10".

A technique I employed was block-printing on un-printed commercial fabrics. There are a few elephants, frogs, turtles, hummingbirds, wolves. I like animals. I can't help it.

In the technique below, I used plain muslin (or sometimes canvas) that I painted using sun-printing and then block-printed.

All pouches are lined with a variety of fabrics. Some of these are scraps from past projects including book cloth. It's a surprise with every pouch what fabric will be inside.

The fabric for this pouch was leftover book cloth that I painted for the demo at Flax. There are two blank journals for sale with this same fabric. I'm usually not interested in coordinated separates, but I couldn't resist. Hopefully, someone else will find the idea irresistible and take a journal and pouch home. I also get to re-use the fabric. Nothing wasted - good idea, eh?

The last time I was in Stone Mountain and Daughter (about 4 weeks ago), I found a 1/2 yard remnant of this fabric. It was originally a plain beige. Naturally, I painted it; and naturally, I used the colors of the Mexican flag. Remember rule three of living on Turtle Island: Color can't hurt you!

Thanks for reading to the bottom. I hope to see you there. Please pass this along to everyone you know.

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