Crafts (and Paris Hilton) take center stage at trade show

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Paris Hilton seized the spotlight for an hour on the first day of the winter Craft & Hobby Assn. trade show this week in Anaheim, creating a controlled ‘Day of the Locust’ scenario as hundreds of people crammed around the booth where she endorsed her new namesake line of fabric embellishment and scrapbooking kits for tweens and teens.

Although Hilton brought a bit of glamour to an industry familiar with rhinestones and glitter — but not so much with big-name celebrities — after she left, attention quickly turned back to the new art and crafts products that are what this show are all about.

CHA is a mecca for crafters. Even though you can’t buy anything and take it with you (it’s for the trade, so wholesale accounts only), seeing new products and hanging out with craft manufacturers, designers and retailers is as close to heaven as you can get. While perusing the aisles where hundreds of booths were set up, I found some terrific new materials and tools and noticed some industry trends as well.

The Accuquilt booth immediately caught my eye, with a new die cutting machine made just for quilters. Die cutting machines, both manual and electronic, have become a huge part of the crafting world, used by paper crafters, scrapbookers, jewelry makers and now quilters, to cut intricate shapes from a variety of materials with little or no effort. The consumer model Accuquilt GO! Fabric Cutter allows six layers of fabric to be cut at once in tons of shapes, including basics such as triangles and squares and more detailed applique designs like birds, leaves and flowers. A bundled cutter package, which comes with a die and cutting mat, will retail for about $349, and individual dies will be priced from about $24.99 to $54.99 (there’s also a larger professional model).

I stopped in my tracks at the studioFLUX booth, coming upon a great find — kits for making assemblage metal jewelry and for learning how to use a jeweler’s saw, rare sightings in the craft world. The kits are from renowned metal jewelry designer Thomas Mann. The Found Object Sandwich Kits include metal and other components for making assemblage jewelry, and the Learn to Saw kit includes a saw frame, blades, materials to saw, plus a DVD and book. Mann’s timing couldn’t be better, with jewelry and mixed-media art becoming increasingly popular and materials and instruction often difficult to find. He gave me a quick sawing tutorial, and I can happily report I only broke one blade.

On the fiber side of things, Artfelt is a new way of blending elements of needle and wet felting techniques into a simple process, with the help of a clothes dryer, easily turning wool roving into gorgeous scarves, bags and coats. Fabric and ribbon can even be incorporated into the design.

Lion Brand Yarn, familiar to most knitters and crocheters because of their omnipresence at big-box craft retailers such as Jo-Ann and Michaels, introduced several new specialty yarns, such as 100% cashmere and organic wool — typically not found in the acrylic-heavy aisles of those places. Lion Brand President and CEO David Blumenthal said consumers are slowly becoming savvier about luxury yarns, and they’re also driving the desire for more eco-friendly fibers, like Lion’s Recycled Cotton yarn, made from slated-to-be-trashed cotton fabric. ‘The world has gone in that direction, and we want to be eco-friendly,’ Blumenthal said.

Recycling and repurposing materials and using nontoxic supplies are on so many crafters’ minds that the theme of this year’s show was ‘It’s Easy Being Green.’ The indie craft movement, made up mostly of younger crafters who have added a hip, stylish accent to crafting, have helped drive this trend. ‘As an industry,’ said CHA spokesman Victor Domine, ‘it’s not enough to say we’re doing it, we are empowering our members and crafters around the country to really make strides.’

The green influence was even seen in packaging, as with Duncan Enterprises’ Tulip line of powdered fabric dye, packaged in a plastic bag in which the air has been squeezed out, allowing for a smaller container. What to do with that dye? Use it to stencil designs on an old hoodie, of course, up-cycling it and giving it new life.

Indie crafters, whose cutting-edge work can often be seen in such magazines as Make, Craft and ReadyMade, have inspired mainstream crafting as well, Domine says: ‘Indie isn’t indie anymore. It’s really becoming the lifeblood of the craft and hobby industry. We have designer members who design products and projects that help these craft companies develop [merchandise] that goes directly to the consumer.’

The fact that so many crafters are turning their hobbies into full- or part-time businesses, selling on Etsy (the popular online site for handmade goods) and at craft fairs and retail stores, has perhaps spawned a new generation of souped-up tools that give professional results, like those die cutting machines. The next generation may be found in devices like Yudu, a self-contained home silk-screen machine from Provo Craft that’s large enough to print on T-shirts. Using a pre-made screen, I printed a perfect, elegant damask design in metallic silver ink on a black T-shirt. It more than made up for the broken saw blade. The machine retails for about $300.

The Internet and computers have had a huge impact on almost every aspect of crafting. Online crafting groups have fostered a worldwide community, tutorials are only a click away, and computers have become a frequently used design tool. Digital scrapbooking continues to find new fans among men and women who create only digital pages, or do hybrid albums that combine digitally rendered pages with actual materials such as faux flowers, rub-ons and stickers.

Scrapblog is an online site that allows scrapbookers to design pages by choosing digital products from top familiar brands such as Anna Griffin and Cosmo Cricket, plus share them online. And Digital Scrapbook Artist is a software program with which scrappers can easily drag and drop digital embellishments, frames and fonts, plus use a variety of photo brushes. I learned during a brief lesson on the program that many of the images, such as jewels, are scans of actual objects, lending an authentic look.

There’s no doubt the crafts industry is taking a hit along with other businesses. Magazines have folded and many stores have closed. However, several craft retailers, including big box retailers, independents and online sites, reported an uptick in sales over the holidays, while other companies were in a sales slump. So perhaps, like our grandmothers and grandfathers discovered, making stuff helps get us through the lean times in more ways than one.

-- Jeannine Stein

Top photo: courtesy of Accuquilt