From now until the fair, we’ll be spotlighting awesome items that you will find at this year’s Crafty Bastards. Check out the complete vendor gallery to plan your shopping!

Steve Strawn has a story to tell. It is a fascinatingly beautiful tale of robots kicking the crap out of us. Since he is the world’s only photojournalist war correspondent sending back photos from Great Robot War, I was lucky to get the chance to ask him a few questions about his photography. Here we go:

Question: How long does it usually take to set up a scene for your photos?

Answer: It can take from minutes to days, depending on the inspiration, complexity, and the amount of stuff needing to be blown up. In particular, if something is to be destroyed, the setup needs to be much more meticulous, because the ligthing needs to be exact.

Question: Are you constantly searching for new toys to use?

Answer: All the time. My wife is convinced it is an excuse to just go ahead and buy more toys. It kind of is.

Question: Your robots are very simple, unlike most toys in stores today, where do you get them?

Answer: They are from Stikfas, who makes these wonderfully unbranded and incredibly articulated toys. They are not Power Rangers, they are not Transformers, they are some ambiguous robot from another world who is perfectly posable.

Question: Do you build/make any of the items in your photos?

Answer: I am starting to build more of my figures. There’s a lot that goes into my shoots that is hand-built, and a lot that is store bought. I do want to get away from the store-bougth stuff more for creative and lawsuit reasons, though.

Question: Do you have a true fear of the kinds of attacks that you are creating in your photos? Are they therapy? (That question isn’t meant to be rude, most of what I make is about zombies, even though I am not afraid of zombies. I am really afraid of sharks and seamonsters, actually!)

Answer: Robot invasion scares the shit out of me. Zombies are scarier because they were once people, and now they are something else, and for some reason that is far more terrifying than an automaton that’s here to tear us up. That being said, a zombie can only do so much damage, a robot can blow shit up hard, and really wreck things badly. And yes, it is therapy.

You can pick up some of Steve’s work at Crafty Bastards on September 28th at the Marie Reed Learning Center, 2200 Champlain St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, DC. Check out more of Steve photos at www.splutphoto.com

Tina Seamonster blogs her life and craft at I Like Seamonsters.com. Her biggest fear is men with shark heads. What the hell does that mean?

Charm City Craft Mafia just announced that applications for their winter craft fair - Holiday Heap 2008 - are now available online.

Holiday Heap will be November 15th, 2008 from 10-5pm at St. John’s Church in Charles Village (Baltimore). 40+ of the country’s most crafty vendors will be carefully chosen by a panel of jurors to sell their wares and thousands of shoppers are expected, much fun is guaranteed! Click the words “apply now” below to do just that:

APPLY NOW!

Applications are due October 5th. Jurying and acceptance status will be emailed by October 15th. There is a non-refundable $10 application fee required to complete the application process. Accepted vendors will pay an additional $65 for a space. (includes an 6 foot table & 2 chairs).

Phasefest, the East Coast’s largest queer music and arts festival, is looking for a small handful of queer crafters/artists to sell and display their wares at Phasefest 2008. The booth fee is $50 for Friday (6pm - midnight-ish) and Saturday (2pm - 1 or 2am-ish). For that cost, you’ll have a designated space on the back patio at Phase 1 Lounge, the oldest lesbian bar in the country, the ability to hear and enjoy some of the nation’s best queer music, and the opportunity to sell your wares to a captive audience of awesome queers!

If you are interested please e-mail phasefest@gmail.com for more information or visit their website and click on the “artists” tab: www.phasefest.com. Fill out the application and send it their way!

Here’s a cool opportunity for local crafters to donate their work to a good cause.

The Alice Ferguson Foundation, a nonprofit in the Washington, DC area that hates on litter and does environmental education for inner-city kids, is having an Oktoberfest fundraiser with a silent auction and they are looking for awesome and crafty items to put up for bid.

Items they’d love to have donated - They heart anything eco-friendly. Photos, drawings, paintings, ceramics, and glass usually do pretty well, but they’re definitely open to anything handmade. Include your business cards and other promotional material so they can set it out alongside your work. October 3rd is the last day they will collect items. You can download the donation form, here.

How to donate - You can send an email to smacken@fergusonfoundation.org or call their DC office at 202-518-7415 and ask to speak to Penny or Shannon. They’ll arrange things from there!

Oktoberfest Time and Date - Saturday, October 11th, from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Place - Hard Bargain Farm in Acokeek, MD (Directions at www.fergusonfoundation.org at bottom of left-hand menu)

Admission - Kids under 7 are free; everyone else is $8 a head
With admission, you get the eating of bratwurst, sauerkraut, potato salad, and homemade apple strudel a la carte (sorry, but you gotta pay for the beer); visitation of barnyard animals; operation of old-fashioned apple cider press; watching of and waltzing with Bavarian dancers; riding of haywagons to the Farm’s Potomac shoreline; purchasing of arts, crafts, and delicacies in the gazebo and a separate silent auction

From now until the fair, we’ll be spotlighting awesome items that you will find at this year’s Crafty Bastards. Check out the complete vendor gallery to plan your shopping!

One of the cutest new items that I saw at Crafty Bastards Silver Spring was the tiny Tofu for Obama plush by Chris Creatures. Not only is this tiny tofu cute, he includes a removable t-shirt and an Obama sign for rallies. He’s ready for campaigning!

Chris was nice enough to chat with me about this little guy.

Question: Where did this silliness come from?

Answer: I’m a huge Obama supporter, so for a long time I kept trying to think of how I could show my love. I’m also a big fan of tofu (fried, steamed, grilled, you name it, I eat it!). In my world, tofu would be an Obama supporter. I’ve made the tofu plush before, but he always seemed like he was missing something. I thought it would be funny to give him a sign and a removeable Obama t-shirt.

Question: You sold these at Crafty Silver Spring, what was the reaction?

Answer: I sold the Tofu for Obamas at Crafty Bastards in Silver Spring. It was fun to see people’s reaction to it. They stopped to laugh and take pictures. I made 30 of them for the fair. They sold out and then I took advance orders. I spent a couple of days after the fair sewing those little guys.

Question: Have you sent one to Obama?

Answer: I have not sent one to Obama yet. What is the best way to send it to him? That is the question. I fear that the tofu would sit in a pile of unopened mail for months. He needs to breathe!

I promise to make more for Crafty Bastards in September. A portion of the purchase will go to the Obama 08 Campaign.

The question that Chris didn’t answer was: What food would be for McCain? Pork chops? Sardines?

Be sure to check out Chris Creatures on September 28th at the Marie Reed Learning Center, 2200 Champlain St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, DC.

Tina Seamonster blogs her life and craft at I Like Seamonsters.com. She is currently being vetted for the V.P. slot.

Applications for CRAFTLAND are due August 31st!

CRAFTLAND is a holiday craft show in a unique consignment store format in downtown Providence, RI. CRAFTLAND 2008 will be open seven days a week, from December 5-24th. Now in its 7th year, CRAFTLAND has grown to feature the work of over 150 artists from around the US and other faraway lands. Artists do not need to be present to sell their work at CRAFTLAND, but those that volunteer 12 or more hours are rewarded with a 70% retail cut (while artists who do not live in the area or who are not able to volunteer receive a generous 60%). CRAFTLAND also donates 5% of proceeds to area arts-related non-profits to help continue in its mission to provide and enable economic opportunities for emerging and professional artists and crafters.

Apply online today!

For frequently asked questions about applying to Craftland, please visit http://craftlandshow.com/faq.html.

To see a listing of last year’s artists, check out http://www.craftlandshow.com/artists.html.

Got old sweaters? Make some seahorses!

These lovely seahorses ($40 for the set) by Snaulkter are made from 99% recycled materials; old (washed) sweaters and plastic shopping bags in the fins to make them crinkle. Not only do I love these guys because they are upcycled, but they are totally kid friendly. I could see my kids spending hours making up stories about the Papa Seahorse and his babies. What an awesome use for an old sweater!

I can’t believe it is that time again, but it seems like the holiday indie craft shows are starting to accept applications! If you feel like traveling this December, you might want to apply to Bazaar Bizarre Boston. The show will be held at the Castle on Sunday, December 7, 2008, from 11am – 7pm.

Some history of the event from their website:

Bazaar Bizarre began in 2001 in the Boston-area as a hodge-podge of friends and acquaintances cobbling together their handcrafted DIY wares to sell and staging an offbeat entertainment extravaganza. In its seventh year, the Bazaar Bizarre has brought its hip, fun craft fairs to Boston, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and San Francisco. Last year, over 3,500 shoppers attended the 2007 Boston Bazaar Bizarre at the Cyclorama.

Bazaar Bizarre is a juried craft fair that receives 300+ applications for 150 vendor slots. The vendor fee of $165 will get you one 6″x3″ table and two chairs. According to their application, you are not allowed to bring any additional tables or displays that will not fit on your 6″x3″ table. Eek!

Applications are due online by August 29. You can apply here.

The 2008 Handmade Arcade will be held Saturday, November 8 (10am-7pm) and Sunday, November 9 (11am-5pm) at the Hunt Armory, 324 Emerson Street, in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Handmade Arcade is held indoors. Each vendor receives an 8-by-2.5 foot table and two chairs. Each vendor space is 8′ x 8′.

Applications for the 2008 Handmade Arcade are due August 17, 2008. Apply online.

You can check out photos of past events on the Handmade Arcade Flickr page.

If you have done this show in previous years, please post your experiences in the comments!

From his “Consumed” column to his Murketing Blog, Rob Walker is a great storyteller and keen social commentator. Walker’s New York Times Magazine article, Handmade 2.0, is legendary in indie craft circles. It was the first mainstream media article about the handmade revolution that really got it.

In his fascinating new book, BUYING IN: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, Walker examines the dialogue between who we are and what we buy. His research into brands like Red Bull, Sanrio and Converse is eye-opening and funny.

Walker will be discussing his new book at Politics & Prose (5015 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.) on Wednesday, August 6th at 7 p.m. Plus — he’ll be giving away 25 of these awesome screenprint posters from Little Friends of Printmaking. He was nice enough to answer our questions about marketing, Etsy, Hello Kitty and more.

Q: What company, in your opinion, is the best at “murketing” right now? Who’s the future “murketer” of the year?

A: I wouldn’t to crown anybody “best,” but I like the idea of “murketer of the year” — it would have to be the kind of thing where it would be up to others to decide whether that’s a badge of honor — or a badge of shame.

A couple of things I’ve read about just recently would be good nominations.

One involves MTV and Sears. Basically they’ve collaborated on a movie called The American Mall, which will air on MTV in the fall; it was shot in a Sears and all the characters wear Sears clothes. Sears will sell the DVD in its stores, and the soundtrack. Characters from the movie will be in Sears newspaper circulars. And of course there will be Sears ads during the show. But basically it’s impossible to tell where the “entertainment” begins and the “marketing” ends. Very murky.

The other is the Chris Brown single “Forever,” currently number 9 seller on iTunes. Turns out the bit where he says “Double your pleasure” is no coincidence: He was hired by Wrigley to update the famous Double Mint jingle. (Other pop star types were hired to update the Big Red and Juicy Fruit jingles.) Once Brown cut his new version of the jingle, he added some additional lyrics and voila — pop hit, courtesy of Wrigley gum!

The music arena is a really interesting one for murketing, because it used to be a site of resistance — people were mad when Nike used a Beatles song in an ad, that kind of thing. That’s really changed. Procter & Gamble may be one-upping this Wrigley thing, because they’ve reportedly cut a deal with Island Def Jam to form a record label together. It’s called Tag Records — Tag being a P&G brand of deodorant. Once upon a time people might have shied away from getting a record deal with a label founded to promote, and indeed named after, a brand of deodorant. Keeping an eye on that one.

And then there was the thing where McDonald’s paid to have its branded iced coffee prominently placed on the set of a news show in Vegas. That one kicked up a bit of a fuss, but I’d say it’s still in the running for Murketing Moment of 2008.

Oh, and I have to note the Dove “Campaign For Real Beauty,” which while not particularly new, keeps adding to its murky heritage: It recently commissioned Judith Thompson to write a play about aging and beauty. So, a theatrical production tied to the brand message — that’s a new one.

Okay, that’s enough of that.

Q: Have brands replaced a lost sense of community in some way?

A: There’s definitely a widespread feeling of lost community, and brands attempt to tap into that, sometimes explicitly; and there are those who argue that Apple and Harley Davidson and so on do add up to community.

But brand communities aren’t real communities, in the way that someone like Robert Putnam (”Bowling Alone”) would define that idea. Community isn’t just about shared interest in something, it’s about shared wilingness to sacrifice for higher ideals, for things that transcend self-interest. Brands communities don’t deliver on that — which is one of many reasons that consumption can be frustrating, actually. We buy into ideas about brands that they really can’t deliver on. And when they don’t, we end up trying to buy something else to find satisfaction, and the cycle repeats.

We’re very often not conscious of all this, or that this is what marketers are aiming for, and that’s a big goal of the book — to give people a look behind the curtain, both at how the commercial persuasion industry works, and at how our own minds work when it comes to our buying decisions.

Q: In your book, Etsy founder, Rob Kalin says, “It’s the Baby Boomer generation that fell in love with the mass-produced aesthetic,” continuing to call Etsy a resurgence with it’s growing customer base indicative of the backlash against the Wal-Marts of the world. Where is the declining economy in this equation? Is he ignoring the fact that it costs more to shop handmade? Is his vision sustainable?

A: Even Kalin wouldn’t say that Etsy is going to turn back mass production. But … what made me want to write about the craft/DIY world (which Etsy is part of) in the book is that there is sort of built into it a different way of approaching consumption. And it’s not just about spending more money.

To me what’s intriguing is that so many participants in that world bring to material culture a different implied critique, having to do with basic questions like: Do I need to buy this — or can I make it? If I do buy it, what can I learn about how its made (what’s it made of, and by whom)? The handmade world can answer those questions in ways that are less alienating that shopping at a mass merchant, where there’s no one to ask, and you can maybe Google up some report but it’s hard to decipher, etc.

It’s certainly true that plenty of people end up on Etsy for totally unrelated reasons — they just see something cute on a design blog, and they want it. That kind of thing may well suffer in a down economy. But if you’re thinking on an individual level, to me the issue is: Whatever brought you into contact with the handmade world, isn’t it getting at some pretty core issues that are worth considering? Our consumer choices really do matter, both to our own personal satisfaction, and to the broader culture (via ecology and labor practices etc.)

It does zero good to just sit around and complain that “we’re all too materialistic.” Nor do I think is denial of the pleasure of the material a practical strategy. So I’m very much a believer in the idea that change happens on an individual level. Maybe it means ending up with fewer things — that are ultimately more satisfying. More satisfying individually, and socially. It’s just a different way of thinking.

Q: You also talk about the “projectability” of Hello Kitty and how she is kinda everything and nothing all at once to people who love her. Do you think it is because she doesn’t have a mouth? If so, isn’t that kinda sad?

A: Hello Kitty — sad?? No way!

Seriously, there is no easy answer to Hello Kitty. I use her in the book as the opposite of an answer — she’s a mystery. The solution to that mystery somehow rests in the millions who have consumed her image, not in the image itself. I do quote someone talking about how having no mouth is the key. But, my view is that “the key” is almost never in the symbol or object — it’s in us, the consumers.

Remember that Sanrio has created more than 400 other characters. And they would LOVE to have another Hello Kitty.

They’ve never come close.

If it was just about the lack of a mouth, I think they woulda done it.

Q: What do you think about whole crop of user-generated/ designed brands (like Threadless). With these companies, the consumer can be both artist or wanna-be artist and thus has even more reason to market the brand.

A: The obsession with Threadless in the business press & business college courses has become almost comical. There’s a lot of creativity out there, for sure. I think one of the interesting things to happen with Threadless is that it’s creating “stars” like Glennz, who has launched is own brand after emerging as one of the winningest designers on the site. I’m keeping an eye on that and wondering if we’ll see more of it, because that scenario seems in line with other examples of indie-preneurialism from crafting to the streetwear scene.

Q: We’ve come a crazy long way from the 1940’s when Pepsi was known to use Skywriting to advertise. They couldn’t have possibly ever conceived the new world of “murketing.” Where are we headed? What will the world of advertising look like 50 years from now?

A: Hmmm. Ever see “Minority Report”?

Q: What do you think of Twitter as a marketing tool? Are people more likely to buy from Zappos because they know what the CEO is having for dinner?

A: People ask about Twitter a lot, but this is actually the first time somebody’s asked me about it in an interesting way. Because it actually might be helpful to Zappos that people can find out what the CEO is having for dinner. In a weird way that kind of plays into something that I think is real, which is that for all the tech “empowerment” going around, and all the talk of “transparency,” shopping remains pretty alienating in a lot of ways. It can be really hard to get the information you want about how something is made, and so on.

Obviously knowing what the CEO had for dinner has nothing to do with that. But it does at least humanize the guy, in weird way. And there’s probably a segment — a small segment — of the Zappo’s audience that responds to that.

That said, a much bigger segment, I’m sure, is attracted by their return policies and the other real aspects of their business. That’s the real key, I assume, to their success.

Which brings up a recurring theme in my conversations with business people and marketers for big companies. They don’t want to make big substantial changes to their businesses, they want to do something quick and easy and totally trivial to change their “image.” Having the CEO use Twitter would be a perfect example of that, actually. I’m sure there’s a consultant somewhere getting paid a lot of money to tell some CEO that if he wants to have Zappos’ success, he should get on Twitter, pronto.

Q: With all of this thinking and writing about buying, are you someone who thinks over every purchase or do you try not to obsess too much?

A: It’s certainly part of my job to spend an awful lot of time learning about new stuff — in stores, magazines, web sites, on the street. A side effect is coming into contact with a lot of things that, you know, I like. (There’s aren’t the things I necessarily write about, because the column has different criteria). The weird thing about the Consumed column is that every single week I’m dealing with some new thing, some object or brand, and often I go through this same cycle — at first I get really excited and think “When I’m done with the column I’m definitely buying one of these!” Then a week later, by the time I’ve finished the column, I’m over it. And I almost never bother to buy it. I’m sort of done. It’s like virtual consumption, I get the vicarious thrill of the encounter with something new, but it’s faded before I’m in a position to pull the trigger. I think this saves me a lot of money! Not to mention cuts down on useless-junk clutter in my closet (and landfill).

In a way this has affected me, in that even when I’m just plain old shopping I think more than I used to about how I’ll feel about something in a week, or a month, or a year. And that’s probably even truer after some of the stuff I learned about writing the book, in terms of how our minds work and the way nonconscious processes can lead us astray. Plus I’ve thought a lot about what I call “unconsumption” — about the end point of the life of a thing. When we throw something away or otherwise get rid of it. I’m more interested in trying to find satisfaction at the end of the process than a thrill at the beginning, so basically I judge the “success” of a purchase by how long it lasts, how long I enjoy it. I don’t obsess over all this — and I still buy things on a whim, and all that — but sometimes it’s helpful to take two second to ponder it.

And … sometimes this process also ends up forcing me to re-discover things I already own, rather than getting something new. I’d love to do an ad campaign for things we already own. I was thinking of making that the sponsor for Murketing.com: “Things You Already Own! Enjoy Them Today!”

***
Thanks to Rob for answering our questions! If you have questions of your own for Rob, you can ask them at Politics & Prose (5015 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.) on Wednesday, August 6th at 7 p.m.

Tina Seamonster blogs her life and craft at I Like Seamonsters.com. Her current favorite things are owl pajamas, Odwalla bars and podcasting.