I had a great time at the Craft Congress, except for the sudden and intense migraine (but that’s a story for another time. A big thanks to Callie from Church of Craft, Marie the Bee from the Sampler,  Zak (an Etsy engineer), and a few other helpful crafters who nursed me back to health!).

Wow- there was so much to take in at the Craft Congress!  Rachel Hospodar from MediumReality did a great job running the show.  This year's Craft Congress was held in the beautiful Brava Theater in San Francisco:

I attended a talk on real-life networking, moderated by Lorraine Sanders of SF Inide Fashion blog.  Sherry Huss from O'Reilly (CRAFT and MAKE Magazine) recommends sending a short, direct follow-up email after you meet a person you want to network with.  Betsy Greer of Craftivism.com urges crafters to just keep it real and be nice when approaching people whether it's face-to-face or online, and refuses to buy into the idea that there’s a hierarchy in the craft world.

Faythe Levine showed a clip from her doc Handmade Nation (see a post about the doc here, and see her Featured Buyer piece here).

I also sat in on a talk with two theater producers — Ben Peoples and Sara Huddleston — who led a workshop about how to stay organized with your workflow whether your a one-man band or managing a team of others.  

• To-do lists: take the time to do them first thing. Have priorities and long-term goals. Keep those goals visible in your studio.  Use BasecampHQ, GoogleDocs for online colloboration and try somehting creative like  a restaurant order rail with your tasks as bills.  
• Good Communication: Be very clear about the expectations with each project you work on, especially when dealing with outside parties.  If you're going to miss a deadline, let the person know as soon as possible: apologize, let them know it won't happen again and give a realistic estimate of when you will deliver.  No sob stories!  If you're setting the deadlines, pad them with a few extra days.  Remember: it never hurts to follow-up phone conversations with emails detailing the important decisions you make.
• Production: Even if you're a one-person team and you're making one-of-a-kind items, you can still divide your tasks into stations and save time by concentrating on one station for a designated amount of time. Rachel Hodopar from MediumReality recommended identifying how many different hats you wear as a one person business and divide these tasks up so you can better organize your time.
• Motivation: Don't have TV or other distractions in your workspace! When you're feeling low, look at books or websites of your favorite things, work by artists who inspire you or go for a walk in a place you've never been before.

Debra Roby of BlogHer brainstormed with folks about online social networking tools.  I learned a lot in this workshop!  Her mantra: "Social Media is marketing."  She walked us through making a social media map of our own —  take a piece of paper and  divide your paper into 4 quarters. One box is for your outgoing messages, second is for your incoming items like RSS feeds, third one for your marketing, and then the last one is community building. Here are but a few of the tools you should check out, perhaps news ones to add to your maps:

• www.sk-rt.com might be better suited Etsians trying to spread the word about posts than Digg, which has a reputation for having techies as its user base.
• Debra swooned when someone mentioned Twitter. The Storque (follow us!) is twittering too.  You can read more about Twitter in this post.
• Everyone is using flickr.com to share their photos. While flickr isn't meant for pushing — ahem — selling your items, it's a great way to show your process and also share a bit about your handmade lifestyle.  Watch this space for a how-to  about the dos and don'ts of flickr.
• ning.com, which allows you to create your own social networking applications.
• StumbleUpon and del.icio.us are other socially-networked ways of bookmarking and sharing your finds on the internet.
• Blogs. Everybody's got a blog. There are some Etsians who join forces in things like blog rings (see Etsy Team Tips: Etsy Teams Blog Ring!).
• Etsy mini is a widget that allows your shop or favorites to be posted on your blog or website. Check out this how-to for the Etsy mini: TimothyAdamDesigns' Etsy Mini How-to Video.
• Use an email listserve or newsletter to keep your customers updated.  
• Stylehive, a networked shopping site for trendy items.
• Google Docs are a way to collaborate on documents. You can upload Word docs or spreadsheets and share them rather than using attachements or just create them right there in Google Docs, publish them to the web, or use them for your internal purposes. You just need a free Google account. It's also great if you don't have compatable software, like Excel or Word.
• utterz.com allows you to upload text, photos, video or voice from your phone to your blog.
• seesmic.com lets you use audio and video online really easily, read more here.
• This one could be really useful: shareaholic.com: "makes it easy for you to submit the web page you're on to your favorite sharing or bookmarking service, including: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, friendfeed, google bookmarks, magnolia, mixx, reddit, stumbleupon, tumblr and twitter. You also have the option to e-mail the web page directly to a friend." 
• socialmarker.com is another one of these sites that aggregates your aggregators.

The Art Craft vs Craft Craft talk was really interesting as everyone pushed the idea that craft is whatever you want it to be. Claire Joyce who makes glitter paintings talked about how she first started using glitter to annoy grad school snooties. Mike Homes from the Velvet da Vinci Gallery noted that we just have to wait and see how people perceive art and craft in 10, 20 years.  Garth from Extreme Craft said, "If you want to be seen in galleries, go for that! If you want to go for the boutiques or craft shows, go for that!" Brent White from Impeti warned of the dangers of being pigeonholed with a DIY aesthetic, when handmade can be very refined and craft-oriented as well.
It’s a time when the boundaries seem to be falling away, but at the same time panelists brought up the need for more exploration into the histories of the indie craft movement. This segued into a challenging discussion of country craft; oft-poo-pooed by tastemakers and indie crafters as cheesey. And yet, many crafters took to the mics to proclaim their respect and admit their soft-spot for country craft; acknowledging that without it, there wouldn't be an indie craft movement. Most of us learned how to crochet or stencil or glue from our mothers or grandmothers while helping them make the time-honored wooden coat-hangers painted with ducks in bonnets.

I also had a chance to meet Etsy sellers Girlontherocks and KatyKristin who professed thier love for the new batch shipping options and the ability to download your shop’s sales figures. Here they are pictured with Caitlin Phillips of www.rebound-designs.com:


A new Etsy seller, ShanaAstrachan, who specializes  in high-end art jewelry told me that Etsy seems to be catching on in her art jewelry circles, where artists have traditionally sold their work through galleries and specialized shows. She’s optimistic about Etsy as a new venue for art jewelry, where pieces easily run into the thousands of dollars. We spoke a bit about how useful an extended profile page would be, with space for a portfolio of work not for sale, clippings from press pieces, gallery shows and more info about the artist. She told me she currently uses Etsy as her e-commerce function on her own website, an option appealing to many already established artists.


Sadly, I didn't get to all of the panels and there were so many people I'd wanted to meet. Next time!

Finally, as a lead in to our soon-to-be-launching eco-friendly series Earth Tones, I want to give a shout-out to Autumn Wiggins’s presentation on the environmental impact of crafting. We've invited her to write a Storque article version of it.  Autumn writes for craftingagreenworld.com and runs an Etsy shop at stringtheory, as well as spearheading the StrangeFolk festival. Her thought-provoking talk pushed crafters to reflect on where they buy their supplies. She’d done some research through a survey we’d linked to here on the Storque. I was happy to see that 46% of respondents cited Etsy as one of the places they buy supplies; this means that for the most part, they’re buying handmade supplies or de-stashed supplies which would otherwise be thrown away. Many Etsians make it a practice to use found materials and upcycle them into something new, rather than sending them to the landfill.

Autumn brainstormed about a website that would allow buyers to offer up unwanted goods to local sellers to be upcycled and transformed into remade goods. Wouldn’t that be an awesome feature to offer in a new supplies section on Etsy? (Hint hint to the engineers…Think Shop Local, meets a reverse Alchemy meets a new Supplies section!)

Autumn took this a step further, citing Cradle to Cradle, and reminding us that even if many crafters are remaking items from what would otherwise be trash, not all of crafters’ supplies are produced through environmentally friendly or socially-conscious methods. According to her survey, about 90% of respondents cite chain stores as their source for supplies. And so Autumn called for innovative organic and non-sweatshop produced crafts — supplies designed to be upcycled in ways that don’t produce unintended harmful effects such as pollution or wasted energy. Do these supplies exist? Where can we get them? Why isn’t there a store specializing in earth-friendly crafting supplies?

Considering the already huge market for craft supplies, it’s curious that larger stores like Michaels, or producers like Martha Stewart haven’t launched these products, which are in demand — at least judging by the thousands of sellers on Etsy. Maybe Etsians have to let these companies know! I’d like to start a petition calling for more eco-friendly options for craft supplies.

Comment below if you’d like to see such advancements in eco-friendliness! Also comment with any eco-friendly options for supplies that you know of — through your local craft store or online. If you make eco-friendly supplies, post below. We want to know all this for our upcoming Earth Tones series. 

Who's going to the next Craft Congress???