It may come as no surprise that one of our participating artists is a member of Etsy’s Trashion Street Team, a group of Etsy sellers who focus on recycling and upcycling all kinds of discarded and found materials. Emily of Candy Calamity recently interviewed us for their blog. Check it out! In related news, we’ll be posting a new wish-list on Monday for ShowMeEtsy’s upcoming show, Artropy.

Here you see Autumn doing her best E.T. imitation amidst a mountain of donations. Now mind you this was merely 3 hours into the show on Saturday! That quantity more than tripled by closing time on Sunday. Once we got into the groove of sorting(and confiscated some more bins to do so), it was a lot of fun to run the booth! The best part was hearing the stories of the items we were collecting. Many people expressed the original intentions they had for their belongings, and why they had hesitated before to dispose of them, or give them up to the anonymous abyss of a thrift store. To many of them, there was comfort in knowing for sure that the materials would be put to good use, and help local artists make a living. Others found a thrill in collecting and hunting for items on the list. So if nothing else, we concluded it’s just plain fun to keep junk out of landfills! In the end, all that was left over was about a lunch bag full of fabric and paper scraps.

Our make-and-take project, a cute plant pot made from soup cans and leftover yarn, was a big hit with everyone too!

What’s next? Get ready, because we’re going to be at just about every indie craft show in St. Louis this summer! Our next exchange will be at Artropy, an event produced by Show-Me-Etsy, on April 25th. Stay tuned for the new wish-list! (We’ll keep the expired one up for now, just as an example)