Art & Craft shopping in USA
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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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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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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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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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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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Ten Thousand Villages
A unique nonprofit store, Ten Thousand Villages imports handicrafts from developing countries for a fair price, so you won't find any incredible bargains here. On the other hand, the craftsmanship on baskets, pottery and textiles is excellent, and you can rest easy knowing your purchase helps to pay for food, education, health care or housing for somebody who needs it.
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Illinois Artisans Shop
The best work of artisans from throughout the state is sold here, including ceramics, wine jugs, glassware, mobiles, toys, and glass and wood coaxed into jewelry. Prices verge on cheap. The enthusiastic staff will tell you all about the people who created the various pieces. The Illinois Art Gallery next door sells paintings and sculptures under the same arrangement.
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Gallery 37 Store
It’s a win-win proposition at this nonprofit entity: painters, sculptors and other artists get paid for creating their wares while teaching inner-city teens – who serve as apprentices – to do the same. Their artworks, including paintings, mosaic tables, puppets and carved-wood walking sticks, are sold in the gallery here. Profits return to the organization.
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Johnny Donnels
The gallery of a fine local photographer, whose work turns up in galleries, museums and publications across the country. The collection is anchored by some touchingly beautiful shots of the French Quarter, as well as revealing portraits of musicians and people in New Orleans. Donnels has a fine eye, and he's been shooting New Orleans for years.
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Society of Arts & Crafts
This prestigious nonprofit gallery was founded in 1897. With retail space downstairs and exhibit space upstairs, the society promotes emerging and established artists and encourages innovative handicrafts. The collection changes constantly, but you’ll find weaving, leather, ceramics, glassware, furniture and other hand-crafted items.
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Flax
People who swear they lack artistic flair suddenly find it at Flax, where an entire room of specialty papers, racks of plump paint tubes in luscious colors, and a wonderland of hot glue guns practically make the collage for you. Kid-art projects start here, and the vast selections of pens and notebooks are novels waiting to happen.
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Jeff Chang Pottery & Fine Crafts
Not everything at this beautiful downtown gallery is island-made, but it is all handcrafted. The striking raku pottery is made by Chang himself. You'll also find exquisite hand-turned bowls of Hawaiian hardwoods, art jewelry and blown glass by some of Hawaii's finest artisans. There's another branch at Ward Warehouse.
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ShopColumbia
This is Columbia College’s student store, where artists and designers in training learn how to market their wares. The shop carries original pieces spanning all media and disciplines: clothes, jewelry, prints, mugs, stationery and more. Proceeds help individual students earn income, and part goes toward student scholarships.
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Fourth World Artisans
This exotic bazaar provides local artisans, recent immigrants and small importers a market for their handicrafts, and assistance in learning entrepreneurial skills. Reasonably priced folk art, textiles, masks, musical instruments and jewelry from Vietnam, Ghana, Pakistan and other far-flung countries fill the shelves.
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Celtic Weavers
If you really wanted to vacation in the islands (the British Isles, that is), you may wish to bring home a souvenir from Celtic Weavers. Beautiful handmade sweaters, hats and blankets will keep the chill away on a rainy afternoon. Other items include expensive jewelry and fine china from Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
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Tessuti Zoo
PG's compact downtown is centered on Lighthouse and Forest Aves. It's well on its way to quaintness, but there are numerous little boutiques and antique stores that are worth a gander. One excellent place is Tessuti Zoo which is owned by a designer who hand-makes funky items ranging from ponchos to lawn ornaments.
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Greenheart Shop
This nonprofit, ecofriendly, fair-trade store stocks chocolate from Ghana, banana-fiber stationery from Uganda, rubber soccer balls from Pakistan and organic cotton baby clothes from, well, Chicago. There’s much more, all part of the Center for Cultural Interchange’s project that ensures fair wages to artisans.
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Four Winds Craft Guild
Head here for the island’s largest selection of Nantucket lightship baskets. Highly prized, they command a premium, with the smallest baskets beginning at $175 and purses running into the thousands of dollars. The top-of-the-line craftsmanship is well worth a browse even it you’re not buying.
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Rainbow Gate
One-of-a-kind ceramic dinnerware and handmade tiles feature all the colors of the New Mexico sky - from soft pastel sunrise through midday cerulean blue to fiery sunset oranges, pinks and purples. Color and texture share the space with fruits, fish, horses and birds on too many lyrical tiles to count.
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Pearl Paint Company
An institution in art circles, Pearl Paint sticks out a mile on Canal St. Taking up four floors of a sprawling warehouse, it's got an obscene amount of space and it's all filled with anything and everything to do with painting, drawing, arts and crafts, gold leaf, glitter, glue – the list is endless.
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