American Craft Council Show: Local Stars of Alt Craft

Today marks the end of the American Craft Council's annual extravagannnnza here in Charm City. Rachel and I made the trek together on Friday to ferret out all the coolness we could find. Now, before I begin, let me say as a disclaimer that this show is BIG. I mean, it's so. Freakin. Big. So, in our end-of-sickness (Rachel) and hunger (me) delirium, there might have been a couple booths of supreme awesomeness that we missed. We did our very best to sort out the amazing from the equally amazing, but perhaps less interesting to our sensibilities, just for you, dear reader. I'm going to be writing a few posts this week to cover all that we found, but if there were things you saw that we missed, please jump in and let us know in the comments.

And, here we go.

The first section we beelined for was AltCraft. We knew a number of close friends and buddies were to be found there, including Annie, of Imogene (Annie's on the right, Rachel on the left).

Here's Annie's new display, which I found very effective, and I know Annie found much easier to transport than her former setup. Rachel and I were noticing a lot of amazing displays that really presented such a strong statement- they were very different, but some were so effective in presenting a cohesive idea, I found myself drawn to the booth despite having no interest in the product. It really made me think about my display and what I'm trying to convey with it.

I digress... Hey, look at this pretty lady! It's our own Shannon, of Sweet Pepita!

See those dresses behind her? Someone I know needs to have a baby of the girl variety so I can justify buying one of those.

Shannon was right inside the AltCraft section, which we found much more open and spread out than last year. Each booth in AltCraft had an individual lighting rig, which was really nice. It was easy to navigate, and spacious, as you can see in this shot:

That snazzy sign wasn't too shabby, either. There's Shannon's booth on the right hand side. Moving along the line, we came to Rania Hassan of goshdarnknit's knitted painting display:

So cool, so cool. And if you missed it, go check out Rania and Shannon (as well as Caitlin, who we'll talk about in a later post in this series) on the latest Hello Craft! podcast.

Moving around the perimeter, we came to our good friend and BEST member, Allison Fomich of Tigerlillyshop, who can now add "Television Personality" to her list of credits... go check out her blog for more info on that.

Allison was showing her electroformed line of jewelry, which is sort of like plating, but instead of silver or gold, she uses copper. The process is really cool, and as you can see, the results are beautiful.

Hooray for our local AltCraft heroes! Well done, ladies! Stay tuned for the next peek into the ACC's 2009 Baltimore show later this week...