Portland craft article in today’s Willamette Week! October 3, 2007

I was so excited to see Beth Slovic’s “Crafty B*tches” cover story in today’s Willamette Week! She interviewed me and dozens of other crafters for the feature and I really appreciate her graceful, layered approach to crafts and feminism as well as culture and commerce, and Portland as a community inclusive of all these things. So if you never knew that my mom and I marched for the ERA in 1982, or that I tried to take auto mechanics in high school and lasted all of two days before transferring into yet another art class, well, now you do!

Beth highlighted some of my own projects like susanstars and West Coast Crafty, and included some things very near and dear to my heart: my collective PDX Super Crafty, Crafty Wonderland, Diane Gilleland‘s craftypod blog and Church of Craft, Jessica Neuman Beck‘s Cranky Pals, Amy Karol‘s Bend-The-Rules Sewing, Handmade Nation, getcrafty.com, BUST, Etsy, and the Museum of Contemporary Craft. And thanks to the article, I just checked out Mother Made and Andi Zeisler’s embroidered pet portraits for the first time.

Here’s a photo of me in my studio from the article, surrounded by craft implements (the numbers correspond to a list of essentials here in the article — if you’re interested, scroll down):

Chris Ryan photo of me for Willamette Week
photo by Chris Ryan for Willamette Week

A few of my favorite things are mixed in there too: a copy of Super Crafty, two of my log cabin pillows, my Cathy of California mushroom pincushion, my shim+sons wall+pocket board, and my Totinette crocodile earrings!

ps: why b*tches? well, I already get a lot of junk traffic and comments from spammy google searches and I figured I didn’t need to tempt fate by spelling it out!

Leave your comment to Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *