Art & Craft shopping in North America
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North Bennet Street School
The North Bennet Street School has been training craftspeople for over 100 years. Established in 1885, the school offers programs in traditional skills like bookbinding, woodworking and locksmithing. The school’s on-site gallery sells incredible hand-crafted pieces made by students and alumni. Look for unique jewelry, handmade journals and exquisite wood furniture and musical instruments.
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Ten Thousand Villages
A fair-trade boutique where purchases support the work of artisans in low-income countries around the world, you’ll find stationery from Bangladesh, baskets from Vietnam and a plethora of hammocks, drums, clothing and unusual handicrafts. Pick up a far more worthwhile Vancouver souvenir than those maple-syrup cookies and confuse everyone back home.
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Taller Leñateros
A society of Maya artists, the ‘Woodlanders’ Workshop’ crafts exquisite handmade books, posters and fine art prints from recycled paper infused with local plants, using images inspired by traditional folk art. An open workshop, you can watch the art in progress.
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Rincón Artesanal
Owned and run by a friendly mother and daughter, this shop is packed to the rafters with objects made from carved wood, pewter, wax, ceramics and papier-mâché - all made in different workshops throughout Guanajuato state.
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Newfoundland Emporium
Step over Moose, the owner's moose-sized Newfoundland dog, to get at the local crafts, music and literature found here.
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Casa de Las Artesanías
If you don’t have time to scour the Purépecha pueblos for the perfect folk art piece, come to the House of Handicrafts, a cooperative marketplace launched to benefit indigenous craftspeople. Attached to the renaissance-style Templo de San Francisco, arts and handicrafts from all over Michoacán are displayed and sold here. Prices are high, but so is the quality and all your cash goes directly to the craftspeople. Upstairs, artists demonstrate their craft in small shops that represent specific Michoacán towns. You’ll find guitars from Paracho, copper from Santa Clara del Cobre, lacquerware, pottery and much more.
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Carmel Art Association
Shopping is a favorite pastime for locals and visitors alike, and Carmel has plenty of outlets to satisfy the urge, with a particular abundance of galleries, boutiques and high-end specialty stores, including some national chains.
Many of Carmel's 100-plus galleries are laden with frolicking dolphin sculptures and oil paintings of local scenery (including golf courses). But serious browsers will be rewarded with persistence. The weighty and free Carmel Gallery Guide can help with your hunt. The Carmel Art Association has been showcasing the best of local artists since 1927 and is a good place to begin.
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Regional Assembly of Text
The epitome of South Main eccentricity, this ironic antidote to the digital age was founded by pen-and-paper-loving art school grads. Ink-stained fans flock here to stock up on Little Otsu journals, handmade pencil boxes and American Apparel T-shirts printed with typewriter motifs. Check out the tiny under-the-stairs reading room showcasing cool underground art, and don’t miss the monthly letter-writing club (7pm, first Thursday of every month), where you can sip tea, scoff cookies and hammer away on those vintage typewriters.
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Beadniks
Incense envelops you at the door, and you know right away you’re in for a hippie treat. Mounds of worldly baubles rise up from the tables. African trade beads and Thai silver-dipped beads? Got ’em. Bright-hued stone beads, ceramic beads, glass beads? All present. For $3 the kindly staff will help you string your choices into a necklace. Or take a workshop (two to three hours, $20 to $60) and learn to wield the pliers yourself; they take place most evenings throughout the week. The website has the schedule.
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Loopy Yarns
This isn’t your grandma’s knitting shop. Loopy Yarns caters mostly to students from the nearby Art Institute, so the books, patterns, needles, hooks and designer yarns are about as hip as they come. Beginners can learn to knit or crochet in a workshop (two hours, $70 to $90, materials included), while advanced practitioners can learn more complex techniques while making a fair-isle hat or flip-top mittens (two hours, $20 to $60, materials not included). Check the website for the schedule.
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South End Open Market
Part flea market and part artists’ market, this weekly outdoor event is a fabulous opportunity for strolling, shopping and people-watching. Over 100 vendors set up shop under white tents. It’s never the same two weeks in a row, but there’s always plenty of arts and crafts, as well as edgier art, vintage clothing, jewelry, local farm produce and homemade sweets. For antiques, go directly to the SoWa Antiques Market inside the old trolley barn.
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Wolfbait & B-Girls
Old ironing boards serve as display tables; tape measures, scissors and other designers’ tools hang from vintage hooks. You get that crafting feeling as soon as you walk in, and indeed, Wolfbait & B-girls both sells the wares (tops, dresses, handbags and jewelry) of local indie designers and serves as a working studio for them. Take a fabric book-binding workshop (two hours, $30, materials and drinks included), and who knows? Maybe your stuff will be for sale soon, too.
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Polanco
Contemporary folk art by Mexican and Chicano artists mix traditional techniques and new ideas at Polanco, from Artemio Rodriguez’s woodcuts of Day of the Dead skeletons sporting Mohawks to a traditional ex voto painting on tin showing before and after portraits of a transgendered friend by Fernando Guevara. Don’t miss the Oaxacan devil masks embedded with actual goat’s horns and teeth, or the Frida Kahlo–esque earrings of silver hands cupping tiny hearts.
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Blim
This popular arts and crafts resource center is well worth a look if you need to scratch your creative urge while you’re here. You’ll find supplies and space to make your own thing – from buttons to knitted scarves – or you can just peruse the gallery and shopping spaces to pick up something someone else has already labored over (you can always tell people back home you made it yourself). There’s a lively list of workshops, events and film nights here, too.
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Casart
You’ll find quality arts and crafts in more peaceful surroundings at the state crafts store, Casart. There’s a big range, and the crafts are often top-end pieces from the villages where the craft styles originated. Prices are fixed, and higher than you can get with some haggling in markets; gauge prices and quality here before going elsewhere to buy. Craftspeople, such as basket weavers from San Pedro Actopan, often work in the store.
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Encantada Gallery
Build your own Mission-style altarpieces with this motherlode of Mexican folk art. Every self-respecting piano deserves a burnished black ceramic candelabra from Oaxaca, fridges cry out for calendars featuring busty gun-slinging revolutionaries, and even offices can turn festive once bedecked in papel picado (cut-paper streamers). Encantada has it all, plus rotating exhibits of contemporary Latin American artists.
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Liberty House
A 1960s grassroots cooperative designed to promote the work of American artisans and farmers, Liberty House retains its ecofriendly mission even in today's global economy. Women and children can pick up organic, natural-fiber clothes (no sweatshop labor here, thank you very much!) and its imported goods are bought directly from artists and artisan collectives who use only recycled or nonendangered woods and materials.
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Wood Co-Op
The silky, highly strokable wood tables and chairs on display here may not be ideal for packing home, but it’s hard not to appreciate the artisanship that’s gone into their manufacture. Regional woods are often used and there’s a striking modern feel to many of the pieces. It’s branched out in recent years and now also offers wooden toys and kitchenware – much easier to pack.
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Michael Dean Jewellery
Pearls and Canadian diamonds feature prominently in the rings created by local artisan Michael Dean, who works on his shiny trinkets at this cozy little island studio. Partners in business and life, his wife Carole also creates her own jewelry and has a sparkling range of abstract designs on silver necklaces. If you’re looking for an extra special pressie for someone back home, this is a good place to start.
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Peking Lounge
If you’re a visiting antiques fan with an interest in old-school Chinese pieces, this is the place for you. Presented like artworks in a lounge-cool contemporary boutique setting, you’ll enjoy perusing the price tags on intricately-carved dark wood chairs and armoires. Check out the lovely silk and linen cushions (new, rather than antique) and consider buying an extra suitcase so you can take some home.
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Renegade Handmade
This store sprung up out of a popular local craft fair. Rather than just selling their goods for two days per year, participants thought it would be a swell idea to have an outlet to sell from year-round. Bravo! The reasonably priced merchandise veers toward mod, such as boho tops, graphic-print guitar straps, journals reconstructed from vintage hardback cookbooks and shadow puppets (why not, eh?).
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Hill’s Native Art
Launched in 1946 as a small trading post on Vancouver Island, Hill’s flagship store has many First Nations carvings, prints, ceremonial masks and cozy Cowichan sweaters, and traditional music and books of historical interest. Artists are often found at work in the 3rd-floor gallery. There are many souvenir stores on Water St, but this is the one if you want to find something special and artistic.
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Bau-Xi Gallery
One of the long-established galleries responsible for the city’s artistic renaissance in recent years, Bau-xi – pronounced ‘bo-she’ – showcases the best in local artists and generally has prices to match its exalted position. The main gallery selection changes monthly and the focus is usually on original paintings, although prints, drawings and sculpture are also added to the mix on occasion.
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Bounty
This contemporary, not-for-profit craft shop can be found inside York Quay Terminal, just west of the Queen's Quay Terminal. Among its wares are creative cards and beautiful dyed scarves, and all proceeds from sales go towards programming at the Harbourfront. Artisans in the adjacent Craft Studio blow hot glass, mould clay, weave textiles, design jewelry and teach classes.
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Arte 256
It's well worth the slog to find this fabulous gallery owned and operated by Tijuana native Joly Lacarra. The revolving exhibitions are generally outstanding. To get there, head out Blvd Aguas Calientes, and up Tapachula, past the Hipódromo. After Tapachula veers left, hang a right (at the big black building). This streets merges with Mérida which you follow up to the gallery.
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