Maker is the Seller, over and over

At OCF especially, my organizations have been spending a lot of time discussing the various aspects of crafting, trying to articulate it in a useful way so that we can continue to protect it. I think hand-crafting needs protections against the many erosions of technology and culture and the ways commerce is done today. You might be aware that etsy, the huge online craft marketplace, now accepts commercially produced items right alongside the handmade. I'm guessing it made economic sense to them, as they had a lot of items on there that didn't comply, and that was a constant problem. It's hard to monitor thousands of people and their products, and apparently a few of them were confused or dishonest about what they put up for sale.

At Saturday Market we are usually pretty clear about the Maker is the Seller, but defining the maker is complicated. Some of us (I'm one) use commercially produced blanks that we embellish, so we don't make the whole item. That's acceptable under current guidelines, but it needs to be looked at from time to time. I don't feel great about it any more, but I can't sew the items I sell, and screenprinting is my craft and I have to do it on something. That's just one person and one issue. You'd be amazed how many nuances there are.

I thought of an image that works for me. As an artist I have a direct relationship with my craft item. I put my heart and mind to it and my hands on it and make it something to sell. This is of course a stronger image with a piece of pottery or a knitted hat, but you can see the image of a person holding an object in their hands. They made it. It wouldn't exist without them. Then they extend the item to the buyer in a second direct relationship. Simple and defined, one person to the other with the object as the bridge. This is what we really sell, that personal interaction. You can't get it from an employee to get that juiciness, or from a gallery, or from an online sale. You can get close to it, but not it. You can only get it in person at a craft fair.

So how far away can you get from that and still preserve the purity of it? Saturday Market allows a family member to sell for another, so you can hear "my mom makes these" or a similar phrase. That's pretty close, but when it's "the person who pays me to stand here makes these" you're too far. Of course gallery sales and online sales help support the crafter, but the direct relationship is less. On etsy I think people like to make a point of putting a lot into the packaging so it really feels like a special item, and I'm sure they put in notes and things to be personal, but on some level it becomes middle distance and then far removed from the source. We don't want that at Saturday Market. We insist on the simple direct interaction.

We have all these specific craft guidelines to preserve that, telling the artist how much of the work they have to do to make the item a craft from the maker. They are online so you can go look at them if you aren't familiar (eugenesaturdaymarket.org) with the details and are curious. It has taken years and years to accumulate them, lots of meetings of the Standards Committee and lots of individual cases to explore and make decisions about. Decades. Hundreds of crafters.

OCF is a bit behind in that kind of documentation and policy, partly because instead of seeing each other every week, OCF crafters see each other once a year there. The direct relationship has eroded. Some people are selling things they haven't made, for various reasons. Some are making them to a degree, for instance they may be solid-color dyeing commercial items, without regard for the fine distinction of the complexity of the garment and the dye job (a refinement the Market has worked on in the recent past) or they might be selling some product they invented but is now being made by contract workers or a factory. OCF does have a crew who looks at the crafts displayed, asks questions, and attempts to determine whether or not they meet the guidelines, but they haven't had the backup of the detailed policies used at the Market.

That is going to change. Crafters and others at OCF are meeting to work out the details on a tuned-up set of craft policies. It's needed and a good thing to do and I'm glad we're putting in the time, but we don't have decades and decades to do it. I feel some urgency, but it's a plodding and plowing kind of activity. Patience is necessary. Most people don't really care and would just as soon get stuff at Pottery Barn online so they don't actually have to deal with a real artist. Plus it will be cheaper.

But you won't get any soul with that stuff. You won't be able to treasure it, to pick it up and see the fingerprints of an artist you know (or knew when they were alive) and to have a role in their life while they have a role in yours. We will lose that direct relationship just as we have with our food (getting that back) and our houses (hardly anyone builds their own nowadays, though you can) and our own souls, which are fed by these satisfying transactions. That's a lot to lose. It needs our protection. We have to care.

Not everyone will. I think minds will be changed, though, as the hand-crafted becomes more and more rare and the necessity for protection more clear. People like me will find better things to print, like the bags I had sewn in Springfield instead of China, and it is my hope that people who have taken shortcuts in their crafting will get back on the long high road. I think I'm seeing that happening. I want to believe that people try hard to be honest and live with integrity, so that those who are telling the large and small lies about their products will let themselves rise to a more pure level of the relationship. I'm going to keep working with this hope in our abilities to improve our lives. We're doing it for ourselves, for each other, for our supporters, and for the future.

See what you can do to help. Improve your product in some small way that you can feel proud of. Buy something handmade yourself, or tell a friend about Holiday Market and go with them there. Maybe you can find something at Market that will delight you way more than the Pottery Barn deal, plus you will get to have a fun and special experience that is way more memorable than one more trip to a parking lot and a big box of a building. With real music made by musicians, and real gourmet food made by cooks. Never the same Saturday twice. Never the same walk around the eight, never the same Fair as last year. You know your soul has been longing for that. Feed your soul.