craftzine.com:

The World of Magpies and Craftsters

by Chrissa Banner
October 07, 2006

When I moved to Boston last summer, the first place my best crafting friend, Julia, wanted to take me was Magpie. "It's this great little shop, and all the stuff they sell is handmade by indie crafters and local designers," she told me. "You'll love it."

My friend Jenny was visiting from Austin, so together the three of us headed over to Davis Square in Somerville, a funky little student-and-artist satellite of Boston, where Magpie beckoned down a side street off the main square. "Shiny things for your nest!" a sidewalk board promised, while a jaunty black-and-white cartoon bird eyed us curiously from the sign overhead.

The Magpie storefront.

Inside, the bright, orderly space was crammed with enticing objects, giving us all sensory overload as we took everything in. Jenny, looking for souvenirs to take back home, swiftly picked out gifts for her whole rock-and-roll family: a silk-screened "English Major" T-shirt for her husband, pink rockabilly barrettes for her kindergartener, and a mini bowling shirt, complete with flames, for her two-year-old son. Julia was busy with the Sublime Stitching embroidery kits, trying to decide between the poodle theme and the coquettish cat designs.

As I browsed the shiny wares, I came across an empty can of Budweiser prominently displayed by some patchwork deer-motif wallets. Was this made by a local artisan?

"Oh, how embarrassing," said the shopkeeper, a petite woman in braids who'd been working intently on a computer at the counter. "One of my partners had a record release party here last night." She did a round of the store and discovered several additional cans, plucking them from where they had been abandoned among the merchandise displays.

We got to talking, and I discovered that this was not just any clerk, but one of Magpie's five owners, Leah Kramer. She obligingly showed me her handiwork. She likes to make greeting cards, though her favored materials are vintage recipe cards. She also makes refrigerator magnets out of vintage cake decorations and earrings out of little plastic charms, like her tiny beer can "beerings."

"I really love finding things at thrift stores or on the side of the road on trash night and finding a way to make something out of them," she told me. "It speaks to your environmental side and your thrifty side. I almost never craft out of expensive materials. I like to keep everything super, super cheap."

She then mentioned that she also runs the website Craftster.org, the incredibly influential online indie crafting community (its tagline is "no tea cozies without irony"), and I became downright star-struck. Because the fact is, in the world of alternative crafting, low-key and self-effacing though she may be, Kramer, along with her cohorts, is something of a superstar, creating both real-world and online forums where the disparate members of the crafting world can connect.

When I asked Kramer how Craftster got started, she told me she originally put it together "just as a lark. I thought of the term Craftster, and I thought it was a funny word for someone who's a hipster who likes to craft, and I also liked how it was kind of like Napster and Friendster. I thought it would be so great if I could create a community where it's all about sharing really cool crafts, rather than music or friends or whatever."

Since its launch in August of 2003, the site has grown to the extent that she now devotes herself to it full time. "It's just now becoming something that I can earn a starving artist wage off of, which is nice," she says. "I can't believe how it took off."

Kramer feels that sites like Craftster, as well as personal blogs, have played a huge role in the growth of indie crafting. "You may not have a lot of people right around you that craft, but you can connect with people on the Internet. It makes it more approachable to try crafting when you see ideas that really speak to you rather than the ducks in bonnets and the usual stuff."

The Magpie and Craftster scene began with Bazaar Bizarre, an alternative holiday crafts fair started for fun in 2001 by a group of friends. Emily Arkin, one of Magpie's co-owners, had played some rock shows with fellow Bostonian Greg der Ananian, and they gradually discovered they knew a lot of people who liked "making crazy things.” They already had experience organizing events from booking shows and knew a lot of artists, crafters, and entertainers between them, "so we had a great mix of people from the start."

"Our venue [for the first BazBiz fair], the Dilboy VFW, set the mood entirely,” says Arkin, a cool nerd-kind-of-rock-chick with funky glasses and a penchant for fantasy and role-playing games. “It has all this wood paneling so it's kind of like a party in your grandpa's finished basement, if his basement had a disco ball and $2 beer. And it was crowded! The event was so much more popular than we had thought it would be.”

From its humble origins as a punk craft fair in a little VFW space, as of 2005 the Boston Bazaar Bizarre comfortably filled the 20,000 square-foot Cyclorama building in the South End. As the doors opened last December, the line snaked a block down Tremont Street.

The majority of the venue was taken up by rows of tables with customers clustered about them. At the table for My Paper Crane, regimented lines of plush cupcakes and toast slices looked smilingly up at potential buyers, while over at the Damned Dollies booth, the demented little figures had more of an evil-eye approach. Everywhere people were loading up with goodies: brightly-colored origami ornaments, handbags made from vintage calico, silkscreened robot tees, confrontational message neckties, candy-colored porcelain dishes embellished with tiny animals, knitted intarsia scarves with Pac Man and pirate motifs. Everywhere people were swooping in on the next table, compelled by the promise of what unique creation they might discover there.

Magpie owners Kramer, Arkin, Dave Sakowski, Simone Alpen, and Dave McMahon met while collaborating on BazBiz (Kramer and McMahon, already a couple at the time, are now married). The decision to open a year-round store was, as McMahon describes it, "a logical extension of the Bazaar. We heard about a space becoming available, and the idea of having a place for [crafters] to show and sell this incredible stuff was impossible to refuse. Also, I loved the idea of a store that sold nothing you could find at the mall.”

Kramer and McMahon.

Kramer's first book, The Craftster's Guide to Nifty, Thrifty, and Kitschy Crafts was published earlier this spring. In it, she selects actual projects from her collection of vintage crafting books, keeping the original imagery and updating the instructions. "I had to make every project myself," she said. “Some of them are really funny, like people used to glue macaroni on things and paint it gold, and toilet paper cozies shaped like poodles and that kind of thing. But some of them are really cool. Like toothbrush bracelets -- people are making those on Craftster all the time, and I have this really old article about those. It's really neat to see how far back it goes."

Kramer articulates what she sees as the impulse behind the alternative crafts movement this way: "It's fun to make stuff, but you want to make it in your own style and you want it to be an extension of your personality or your sense of humor or whatever." That statement could also describe the appeal that a store like Magpie holds, and the reason Bazaar Bizarre and Craftster continue to gain more fans and followers. "Sometimes people think that there's some sort of feud between traditional crafts and the crafts that younger people are doing," Kramer observes, "but I think that it's all good, you know? There's something for everyone."

See More Magpie Photos - Link.