The Arts and Crafts Zone located in the Central Hall of Modhesh Fun City hones children’s creativity. Offering activities such as drawing and colouring the Zone invites kids of all ages to spend quality time. Children can be seen involved in creative crafts using colourful strips of paper and cloth to make mats. It’s an engrossing activity and very rewarding too as at the end of the exercise a colourful mat emerges.

A very interesting addition to this Zone is the area called Under Construction where visitors get to make wooden furniture using the materials provided. Soft wood panels and boards are provided to the participants along with some tools like hammers and screwdrivers. Well, at home you may not want to hand over the carpenter’s tools to the little ones but here you can freely do so as there is an attendant on hand and you can also supervise and join in with your kids for this DIY or Do It Yourself session of furniture making. Children enjoy the activity especially when they are joined by their parents who in crafting the furniture items. Most of the participants prefer to make small stools and coffee tables in various shapes and sizes. Read more…

Construction sites are rubbish-strewn inconveniences to most people, but for an environmentally friendly Thai architect, they spell opportunity.

Singh Intrachooto, a university lecturer and author of several books on architecture and the environment, was so appalled by the tons of debris generated during the building process that he decided to turn it into award-winning furniture.

“I’ve always focused on green buildings, but one day, when I went to the site of an office block I designed, I could not believe the amount of waste that trucks were hauling away from there every day,” he told Reuters by telephone from Bangkok.

“My inspiration to create furniture sprang from an attempt to reduce the amount of waste from my building sites.”

Singh said that up to 40 percent of the contents of most urban dumps is from construction sites, a statistic which spurred him into trying to “rescue” this rubbish. Read more…

Nicole and her husband, Walt Watson, are members of an elite and vanishing breed in America they’re craftsmen. Walt is a third-generation metal-smith who makes custom furniture, gates, or anything you can think of. Nicole has been sewing for 20 or more years, and calls her grandmother her biggest inspiration, although her clothing line doesn’t exactly conjure visions of blue-haired Bingo players. While the pair has done well to invent a niche for themselves, they worry about the loss of their craft to factory-designed clothes and metal.

“In this country, I think we’ve lost our edge,” Nicole said from behind her sewing machine. “Our craftspeople are fading away, and I think it’s really important that we have these skills. It’s important that young people find a way to do these things.” Read more…

These clever pieces have a sense of fun, but would be right at home with Martha Stewart.

Craft has been stealthily nudging its way into fine art since the dawn of surrealism, if not earlier, but the last decade’s proliferation of silhouetting, crocheting, needlepointing, quilting and furniture-making techniques may represent the most visible alteration of art since installation. Think of any offbeat craft (those are all that remain, by the way), and it is probably already in the process of being subsumed by a young, ambitious contemporary artist, if not Martha Stewart. Read more…

Four years ago, Kieu Duc Thuong set up a furniture business, which he named Hai Au. A skilled carpenter, Thuong is both designer and manager and is a minor celebrity in An Tuong Commune in Vinh Tuong District, Vinh Phuc Province.

The 30-year-old craftsman’s birthplace had two traditional woodcraft villages: Bich Chu and Thu Do. He has four brothers, all of whom are carpenters - a skill they inherited from their parents.

When Thuong finished secondary school in 1992, he found work as an assistant carpenter. However, the craft villages began to go down hill because of poor workmanship. Read more…

The biggest gift-giving time of the year always seems to coincide with craft-fair season.

Coincidence or diabolically clever planning on the part of craft-fair sponsors? What does it matter as long as there are plenty of places to drop dough and emerge with presents for everyone near and dear.

Thank goodness the fairs are nicely distributed over a two-month period from mid-October through mid-December. Read more…

Lincoln County Health and Human Services, in partnership with the Oregon Family Support Network, hosts the 5th annual Abha Art & Craft Exposition from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5 at the National Guard Armory in downtown Newport, on U.S. Highway 101 north of the bridge.

View and purchase arts and crafts that are expressions of healing, wonder and hope - all created by mental health consumers. Consumer artists from Lincoln, Benton, Jefferson, Crook and Deschutes counties submit paintings, pictures, sculptures, jewelry, fabric art, as well as perform poetry, and live musical performances. Read more…

Kerri Tassin found the perfect front door with leaded glass for the craftsman-style bungalow she and her husband, Stephen, built four years ago near Willard. So she called the nearest distributor in St. Louis to place an order.

They only work with contractors, they told Tassin without even asking if she might be one.

“It was a little bit sexist,” says Kerri, a petite woman who considers herself rather quiet and reserved. Read more…

Candles, jewelry and dried flowers will be some of the handmade goods for sale today during a craft fair at Allaire Village.

Once the site of an 1830s ironworks company, the village holds three craft fairs each year, but today’s is by far the largest, village Executive Director John Curtis said.

“It’s a nice time of year to be out in the park,” he said. Read more…

In South Africa, arts and crafts have played an enormous role in the visual establishment of cultures and heritage. These are usually seen at curio stalls where baskets, pots, carvings and beadwork are lined up and the hugely popular wooden giraffes stand tall, silently waiting for a buyer, often tourists who will take them far from Africa.

The arts and crafts sector includes an estimated 1,2 million crafters and secures the livelihoods of about five million people in South Africa.

But one of the biggest challenges crafters face in order to assure sustainability and growth is assistance in marketing and management. Read more…