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It's a New Age for Old Crafts
| Article
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15866 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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1 / 1989 |
2,199 Words |
| Author
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Gail Greco
Gail Greco is the author of the just-released Bridal Shower
Handbook (Wallace-Homestead, 1988). |
Inside an old, rustic mill tucked amid stalwart evergreens in the piny Berkshires, the scent of melting wax melds with the crisp mountain air. Inside the restored nineteenth-century post-and-beam grist mill, crafters are rhythmically dipping wick after wick to form candles similar to those made by early American settlers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On a busy day, some six thousand candles will be shipped to stores nationwide. At the Mole Hole in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, they're doing things the old-fashioned way, yet earning a twentieth-century living.
A similar atmosphere pervades the workshop of a South Texas couple who carries on the centuries-old craft of broom-making, using materials (such as broomcorn) that they grow on their land. Bobbe and David McClure of Edinburg, Texas, labor over household brooms and whisk and hearth sweepers, at times filling orders for major distributors. They work with the sort of handmade tools that were used in the olden days.
Craftspeople such as the McClures abound as a renaissance of handmade goods continues to flower in this country. Crafts made in the old style as well as those made in a more contemporary fashion (which are often innovative and entirely new products) are all in demand. Indeed, during the last five years, the craft industry has flourished in the mass marketplace to the tune of some $1 billion a year, according to the American Crafts Council (ACC) in New York. Old-time crafts account for a large part of that figure.
"A large portion of our thirty-five thousand members earns a living at crafts," says Carol Sedestrom Ross, president of American Crafts
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