Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Kara Hayes, Cristin Greenlee, April Tate, & Elizabeth Hahn-Lawrence.
At the dawn of this century, the indie craft movement was not a cohesive entity, but rather a loose, scattered band of artists with Angelfire websites that you found by accident or through the ads in the back of BUST magazine. They made stuff like flour-sack dish towels embroidered with naughty librarians; bracelets strung with big, chunky resin jewels cast in ice-cube trays; or vintage Motörhead T-shirts made a bit more feminine and ironic with help from a BeDazzler. It was a movement forged largely by young women who found themselves trapped between a nostalgic longing for the by-hand domesticity of their foremothers and the last wispy fumes of the riot grrrl movement. They embraced a punk rock DIY ethos, rejected mass-market capitalism, and were in many cases new moms—at the very least, they wanted a source for onesies not drenched in toxic flame retardants or toys their toddler could gnaw on without getting lead poisoning, even if they had to make these things themselves.
In 2003, as people were hopping off Friendster to join Myspace, the Austin Craft Mafia was born, with the idea of sharing a website and a brand that would make its individual artists easier to find. The same year, the first Renegade Craft Fair happened in Chicago, and Schlafly debuted Art Outside in St. Louis. The Rock N Roll Craft Show and Etsy (etsy.com) followed in 2005.
That was the same year April Tate and Rachel Shelton co-founded the St. Louis Craft Mafia under the umbrella of the Austin group. Tate made cigar-box purses and jewelry before finding her craft voice with stuffed animals and dolls as Riley Construction (etsy.com/shop/rileyconstruction), while Shelton produces eco-friendly purses, lunch kits, and more as Sew Good and Trendy (sewgoodandtrendy.com).
“For us, that term ‘indie craft,’ is almost old,” Tate says, “but it’s a good way to distinguish traditional craft from more modern craft.”
“Traditional” being what you’d think: bent-willow baskets, freeze-dried baby’s breath, county-fair decoupage. Modern craft has a winking sense of humor and an edginess that makes it a sort of cousin to indie rock. It also makes full use of technology, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and, of course, Square. “Because Jack Dorsey’s from here, we were the test market for that,” Tate says. “That was in 2008, and it was, like, amazing” to shift to accepting credit-card payments with a smartphone after only being able to accept payments via cash, check, or those clumsy manual carbon-form credit card imprinters.
Currently, the local Mafia has about 35 members (but never more than 40, to keep it from getting too unwieldy), and it’s one of the few Craft Mafias left standing. In 2010, the network represented 30 cities, including some overseas; now, it’s got about a dozen, including St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Glasgow, Scotland. Even the Austin one’s not all that active anymore—Tate says so many of its members became superstars in their own right that they outgrew the Mafia model. In St. Louis, that structure hasn’t created superstars as much as it has developed a large, thriving indie arts-and-crafts scene where skills, help, and know-how are shared with great generosity.
“We have shared success,” Tate says. “We’re not competing against each other. We all want all of us to succeed.”
“St. Louis is a great hub for indie craft,” agrees Elizabeth Hahn-Lawrence, who makes turbans, headbands, fabric scarves, and other accessories under the moniker Just Liv (etsy.com/shop/justliv). “I travel to a lot of other cities for craft shows, and I always feel lucky when I come back to St. Louis, knowing it is special and has this bustling craft scene.” Hahn-Lawrence is co-owner of The Foundrie (thefoundrie.com) at Chesterfield Mall; this fall, she is opening a shop in Waterloo, Ill., where she lives. She’s calling it Philomena & Ruth. (It’s named after both of her grandmothers—she says no one in her family will name a child Philomena, so it’s a different way of honoring her granny.) At press time, there was also an Indiegogo campaign to open a second location of The Foundrie.
Although Chesterfield Mall may seem a long way from modern crafts’ radical roots—e.g., yarn bombing or crafters making stuff under names like microRevolt or Anti-Factory—the store is maybe more a sign of how profoundly American culture has shifted in the past 15 years.
“We are kinda breaking the glass ceiling in some way,” Hahn-Lawrence says. “’Cause for the longest time, indie craft was so underground … and people thought, ‘Oh, I could make that.’” As artists have experimented and refined what they make, upping the “wow factor,” it’s closed the gap between independent artists and the mass-manufactured stuff in the mainstream mall shops (including the ones that ape them, like Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie).
Plus, many of indie craft’s core values—eco-friendliness, rock ’n’ roll aesthetics, third-wave “girly” feminism, making art more democratic, buying locally and ethically—have become nearly mainstream. Five years ago, when the Craft Mafia held its first Green With Indie show in a Webster University gym (where it’s still held), making crafts out of wine corks, candy wrappers, duct tape, or the old fabric in your great-aunt’s basement still seemed almost avant-garde. That year, the show was one of the drop-off points for a new thing called The Upcycle Exchange (upxchange.com), created by Autumn Wiggins of the Strange Folk Festival to keep orphaned art supplies out of the landfill. But now Upcycle’s a busily trafficked brick-and-mortar shop on South Grand Boulevard, and Tate says Wiggins is even trying to find a way to sell new craft supplies—sustainable ones, of course—just to give makers a predictable supply of materials so they have an alternative to the big-box stores.
“Each year it gets better,” Tate says of Green With Indie. “Rachel is really the main drive behind that. She does the most work for it, because she loves the job. And she used to be a nuclear engineer—she’s very used to paying attention to detail!”
Because eco-friendliness is so fundamental for the majority of crafters, wares have evolved beyond items like purses sewn from recycled juice packs. Shelton and artists like Cristin Greenlee of Cristin Rae (etsy.com/shop/cristinrae) design and source their own fabrics.
“I started using fabrics, vintage fabrics, that I’d gotten from my grandma and my mom and gathered out of mere necessity almost, cost-wise,” Greenlee says. But she is trained as a graphic designer, so she eventually began creating her own fabric patterns on the computer and sending them to a company in the U.S. that uses organic locally sourced fabrics and water-based inks. “It’s a huge story when you tell the person the process of how it was made,” she says. That is another huge part of indie craft for her: the story and the human connections. Telling a customer about her fabrics at a show often leads to custom orders, especially around holidays. “I do a lot of custom colors and sizing for kids,” she explains, “like someone wants matching scarves for their daughter.”
In Tate’s case, she can make a stuffed animal or a doll for a child who does not see his or her image reflected in what is found in the aisles at Target—a child of color, one who wears glasses, or one who has a disability. “I even made one for a little boy with a port-wine stain,” she says, because his mother wanted him to feel like he was special and beautiful even though his birthmark made him look different from his peers. Silversmith Kara Hayes of Irie’ Elements (etsy.com/shop/irieelements) says she has a core of repeat customers and that years after someone picked up a business card at a craft show, folks have called and asked her to make a piece of custom jewelry.
“They come back, they find you, they look for you,” Hayes says. “I actually told my husband the other day, ‘I think some of these people would come to my funeral if I died!’ He was all, ‘You’re so weird!’ But I love that I’ve established that relationship with them—they are investing in you, and you’re investing in them.”
And of course, the Craft Mafia has provided a support system for women artists (and some men, too) to own their own businesses, be home with their kids, and escape soul-deadening jobs for something with more meaning. All the women we spoke to mentioned how much hard work their craft requires and that some well-meaning friends and relatives still consider them unemployed, even though they have their own businesses. But that perception, too, is changing, as indie craft grows up and the predominant culture shifts. For their part, the Craft Mafiosos focus on supporting each other, organizing shows, and making their work, always trying to do what they do in new or better ways.
Hayes just moved out of her basement into a true artist’s studio and is working on wax prototypes for molds to make multiples of her jewelry designs. “That’s the thing for me—it’s gotta evolve,” she says. Sometimes she panics about what new thing she’ll offer next season, but the ideas always show up. “Maybe I’ve started working on something metal and I put it aside, ’cause I don’t know where I’m going with it,” she says, “and then maybe something got set next to it, and then it’s finally like, ‘Oh, these two could merge and be cool!’”
Find the St. Louis Craft Mafia at stlouiscraftmafia.com.
Upcoming Indie Craft Events
Schlafly Art Outside
September 5, 6 & 7
Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest, 314-241-2337 x2, schlafly.com.
Strange Folk Festival
September 27 & 28
O’Fallon Community Park, O’Fallon, Ill., strangefolkfestival@gmail.com, strangefolkfestival.com.
Craftoberfest
October 16
Urban Chestnut Brewing Company, 3229 Washington, chelsiehellige@gmail.com, craftoberfest.com.
HoliDIY
November 8
Mad Art Gallery, 2727 S. 12th, facebook.com/holiDIY.
Rock N Roll Craft Show
November 28, 29 & 30
The Luminary, 2701 Cherokee, rocknrollcraftshow.com.
Local Indie Craft Shops
Blue Bird Apparel
6635 Delmar, 636-590-4524, bluebirdapparel.com.
The Foundrie
Chesterfield Mall, 291 Chesterfield Center, Chesterfield, 636-730-4130, thefoundrie.squarespace.com.
Perennial
7413–15 S. Broadway, 314-832-2288, perennialstl.org.
The Upcycle Exchange
3206 S. Grand, 314-282-7042, upxchange.com
