Clickimin Craft Fair 2008
SHETLAND ARTS & CRAFT ASSOCIATION CHRISTMAS CRAFT FAIR
Friday 14TH – Sunday 16TH NOVEMBER 2008
As Christmas approaches, seasonal Craft Fairs are happening in many local halls throughout Shetland, showing our appreciation of handmade and original products as gifts and objects for home interiors.
Next weekend, the handworking volunteer committee of the Shetland Arts & Crafts Association will once again deliver their annual Christmas Craft Fair in the Clickimin Leisure Centre in Lerwick, where sixty of Shetland’s best craft makers, applied artists and designers, will be exhibiting their work together, as members of the Association. Like previous Clickimin Craft Fairs, from Friday evening, through Saturday and all day on Sunday, literally thousands of Shetland residents will discover the newest , best designed and most skillfully made craft and applied art, designed and made in Shetland.
The public will have opportunities to buy craft , place orders for future delivery, meet craftmakers and designers, or commission special pieces for future presentations, home decoration, corporate gifts, or office spaces. For local visitor centres, the Craft Fair is also an excellent market place for well- designed retail product, or for tracking down a local designer to develop specific products for the next summer season.
For many of our craft makers, designers and applied artists, the Clickimin event is the focus of their year’s production; for others it is an opportunity to show new work to a local audience for the Christmas market and to present new forms of collectable pieces. The Craft Fair exhibition complements the craft industry’s year round marketing and sales, through websites, exhibitions in the UK, their own local shops and export sales.
This year ten new exhibitors have made the application deadline and exhibition criteria. Unst is often represented, but new for 2008 are Elizabeth Johnson’s Shetland lace, Eyvor Renwick’s painted stone, Cheryl Jamieson’s fused glass vessels and jewellery, and Jane Macaulay’s handmade cards. Other new exhibitors are KZFeltZ - new textile products by Susan Laurenson of Brae; ceramics from Whalsay by Nick Stevenson; photographic products by Craig Chapman and knitting kits, felting-wool and yarns created in Shetland by Jamieson’s Spinning. Each year young designers appear; Robyn Inkster’s RHI Designs will show small textile accessories- with a dog theme, and Brae High School’s Young Enterprise Group, “Zenith” , have designed and illustrated a children’s activity product.
A broad range of techniques and materials are now applied by designers and artists making craft in Shetland, so the Craft Fair will show wooden furniture and toys; fused glass; woven fabrics; turned wood; ceramics; leather; knitted and felted fibres; cast paper and stone; pyrography; woodcarving; bookbinding; paper sculpture; basketweaving; photography; printed textiles; and jewellery in felt, beaded forms, glass, silver and copper.
The Arts &Crafts Association Craft Fair just keeps getting better. Each year the organising committee, who are full-time and part-time designer-makers themselves, improve the display, the layout, planning and marketing. Although the Craft Fair is financially independent of external funding, and costs are covered by stand fees and a small admission charge, the group have developed an event which is more than a selling exhibition space; it’s become a sociable gathering place for the public and the creative community of exhibiting and visiting craft makers, artists and applied artists, where information and ideas are shared, people are inspired, and many creative collaborations begin