May 12, 2010

Belly up to the Craft BarBy Nancy Davis KhoSFGate.com

San Francisco, CA — The Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco is making it easier for Bay Area crafters to get their creative juices flowing. The Craft Bar, presented on the first Thursday of the month in conjunction with Etsy Labs, is a modern take on the quilting bee, part social hour and part instruction, with museum staff and volunteers circulating to provide crafty expertise and hand out supplies.

At the April event, Katy Kristin Bowen, who sells her handcrafted jewelry and accessories in the museum’s gift shop, was on hand to teach participants how to turn old sweaters donated by Crossroads Trading Co. and Buffalo Exchange into cuddly stuffed animals. Bowen talked an overflow crowd through the project, then distributed easy-to-follow instructions, which included patterns and lots of photos to help even a novice crafter figure out how to make something winsome and unique.

Against the backdrop of the museum’s exhibition on the cloth and culture of Mali, almost 300 attendees sat on folding chairs and benches, leaned against walls and sprawled across the floors in clumps of two or three. With refreshments supplied by Trumer Pils and appetizers from the Mexican restaurant Tropisueno included as part of the $5 event cover charge, crafters used the unique design features of each sweater – buttons, belts and textures – to make one-of-a-kind stuffed animals.

Sisters Casey and Kirsten Archer took the idea of the stuffed plush bear as a mere jumping-off point. Casey, 33, was hard at work sewing a stuffed aardvark from an old gray sweater while her sister joined the edges of a stuffed hammerhead jellyfish with bright thread.

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