INFO & HISTORY

(Parts of this text are excerpted from a piece written and published in the DIYinPDX scrapbook, February 2003.)

Sometimes, to do it yourself, you need a partner in crime. Working together on projects made us more productive than we had been on our own: staying up late, cutting paper for books, designing patterns to sew, and getting messy with glue. While sewing away hours at our machines, we wondered what other people around town were working on. We had daydreams of an event for people who make things to come together, a kind of buy and sell show and tell of handmade goods. It would be called The Handmade Bazaar.

Handmade Bazaar, Portland's buy/sell/trade handmade garage sale, is held annually on the first Saturday and Sunday of June. In a backyard decorated with clotheslines, tents, and hay bales people come together for fun, food, music, and crafts. With a focus on building community around creativity, we provide space to show and share ideas, hang out, shop, and listen to music. No amount of planning can determine how the day will turn out -- that is what is fun about the bazaar -- its shape depends on what people bring to it.

At the Bazaar you might find cookbooks, mittens, bike tube wallets, hand-bound blank books, zines, jewelry, clothing, prints, silk screened t-shirts, 25-cent riffs, pottery, furniture, soap, your new favorite band, plant starts, oil lamps, a photo booth, sun burns, cupcakes, stationery, scarves, lip balm, dolls, sock monkeys, face scrub, noodle salad, hay bales, night lights, tutus, your new best friend, jam, hats, lemonade...and what do you make?

The focus on handmade comes from a basic belief that the general public can be self-sufficient. "Convenience culture" hands us ready-made lives: our homes, food, and clothing are all made by someone else or come from far away. We have become so far removed from the processes involved in creating our surroundings that we feel powerless to build or fix things for ourselves. When we take the time to make our own things and encourage community around making these items, we begin to take back power over our lives. This means deciding individually what we need and want and bringing that into existence. This can range from meeting basic needs to entertaining frivolous fancies. Further, "handmade" promotes individuality over assembly line perfection because of the nature of the objects themselves. What is unique about these objects is not only the physical evidence of a human maker, but the decisions and thought that a person puts into their design. This insures that every handmade item will be different from the next.

The opportunity to buy, sell & trade is also important. Our goal is to provide a free space for local crafters; an alternative to retail stores and art galleries. At the Bazaar vendors set their own prices and decide whether to sell or trade at their own discretion. This insures that every vendor is fairly reimbursed for the costs and time put into their work. For us, trading has always been at the center of our ideas about the Handmade Bazaar. Offering trading as an alternative to selling dispels the myth that money is the only means to get anything. What could be better than trading something you made for someone else's craft? Just as the Bazaar is an alternative for vendors, it is also an alternative for buyers. Where else do you get to see and talk to the person who made your new favorite skirt, and also support them directly?

Thank you for visiting our website, and please join us at our next scheduled event! You can read about upcoming Bazaars on the front page of this site.