I can’t wait to leave for Portland tomorrow for that city’s instalment of the Hello Etsy conference. The main conference is in Berlin this weekend, and several American cities are hosting their own creative small-business conference at the same time. I was very excited and flattered to have been invited to pitch a session for the Portland event, and even more so to have that pitch accepted.

If you’re attending the Portland conference, I hope to see you in my session! We’ll be talking about the ugly side of business. Where “ugly” is totally subjective, as always. Translated into normal human terms, we’ll talk about why it’s important not to ignore, avoid or otherwise shove away the challenging, frightening, downright daunting parts of launching or running a creative business.

Another reason I’m beside myself about this conference? A couple of weeks ago I discovered that Bill McKibben, author and environmentalist, is the keynote speaker at the Berlin conference. His book, Deep Economy, blew my mind when I read it a few years ago*.

Owen and I dug through our disorganized piles of books this morning because I want to take my copy on the train tomorrow. I wish every conference attendee would read this book. Wait. No. I wish everyone, period, would read this book. It takes everything I find offensive about economics and makes it human, realistic, hopeful and inspiring. McKibben is the perfect person to address the issues of small, locally focused business sustainability.

See you in Portland?

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* I was reading Deep Economy during a photo shoot for Interweave Crochet. If you look closely, you may see it in one or two shots in the Winter 2007 issue.

Hello Etsy and Deep Economy is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

I’m really psyched to have had the opportunity to write a bit of a guide to making a Mighty Ugly creature for the CRAFT blog. I mean, it’s CRAFT! And I got to sit for an afternoon and make and photograph an ugly creature! Fun times.

So if you’ve been listening to me blather about ugly for a year but have felt timid about giving the challenge a shot, perhaps that post will help you out. At the very least, I hope it helps explain the concept of the project. And kicks, like, every crafter to make something ugly on purpose.

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In other news, I’m beside myself with excitement to have learned the session I pitched for the Hello Etsy, Portland, one-day small-business conference was accepted! If you’re anywhere near the area, you should check it out – Saturday, September 17th. Oh man. It’s been over a year since I’ve visited Portland. Way. too. long.

New Tutorial on CRAFT: Need a Push to Make Something Ugly? is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

But I’m not terribly disappointed, because next month Vancouver will host its first community-organized Mini Maker Faire. Sanctioned by O’Reilly – the folks behind MAKE magazine, CRAFT online, and Maker Faire – these smaller, local “mini” events are pretty freaking awesome. And the one in Vancouver is going to be anything but mini. It’s going to be huge. And I’ll be there, doing a Mighty Ugly workshop once each on the Saturday and Sunday of the event – June 25th and 26th.

I’ll write more about the event as it grows closer – about why I’m so excited for it and how I’ve been involved in helping to put it together – but for now I’ll embed a wee documentary from the Toronto Mini Maker Faire last earlier this month. It’s fabulous.

And as a teaser for what the Vancouver event will include, check out the Mondo Spider:

Maker Faire Excitement is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

This Thursday I’ll be the speaker at the monthly meeting of the Vancouver Guild of Fibre Arts – 7:30PM at the Aberthau Community Centre here in Vancouver.

I’ll talk a bit about the history of crochet and about contemporary practice and fashion. I’ll also tell the story of CrochetMe.com (which will celebrate its 7th anniversary at the end of the month!), and I’ll talk about how the internet has affected the practice and evolution of crochet and other fibre arts. Mostly, I’ll encourage a lot of discussion and questions/answers.

Won’t you come?

Vancouver Guild of Fibre Arts Event This Thursday is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Kari Chapin, author of the fantastic crafts business book The Handmade Marketplace, has organized a wee panel discussion for the Etsy Speaker Series. I’ll be joining her, Jennifer Judd-McGee, Betsy Cross and Liz Smith (we’re all part of the collective Kari interviewed for her book) to talk about selling crafts locally, globally and online.

As Kari mentions in the book, we met each other on Twitter, and I’m beside myself with excitement to meet her in person. And I’m psyched to meet the other panel members, too. And, frankly, I’m stupid excited to see Etsy. As several of my non-crafter-but-crafts-buyer friends have asked: Yes, there is a physical Etsy HQ. The panel will be a live event there (if you’re in NYC, you can sign up for free here). If you aren’t in NYC or you can’t make the event in person, you can catch it live in the Etsy Virtual Labs. I’m not sure if they’ll record the panel for non-live viewing, so watch it live if you can! (Note: The panel starts at 7pm Eastern time.)

Got questions or topics you want me to keep in mind when I get there? Fire away in the comments.

(The links to the book here are Powell’s affiliate links. Yup, I’m starting to use affiliate links, only for businesses and products I want to recommend or otherwise discuss. In fact, the only affiliate program I see myself using is the one for Powell’s, the most magically ginormous indie bookstore with an affiliate program in all the land. So if you’d like to support both me and an independent bookseller, well, there you go.)

The Handmade Marketplace: How to Sell Your Crafts Locally, Globally, and Online
by Kari Chapin

Etsy Speaker Series, Here We Come: Handmade Marketplace is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

If you’re unfamiliar with the film, it’s a documentary by Faythe Levine about the resurgence of craft. The people she interviewed are in the U.S., but the scene is pretty much the same in Canada and Vancouver has a thriving crafts community.

We speakers will talk about a bunch of things, from what this whole crafts thing is about to the crafts scene here in town to the role of the internet in the current revival. It’ll be informal and there should be time for Q & A before the screening. And the museum is hosting a reception and mini craft fair afterwards, so it should make for a lovely Friday night.

Questions? Fire away!

Handmade Nation at the Museum of Vancouver is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Never content to sit back when a stupendous conversation gets going, we’re doing a live live blog event over at Make & Meaning. It’ll be all about Free, and we hope you’ll join us!

It’s next Tuesday evening – 16th February at 5pm Pacific time/8pm Eastern. To participate, just go to this page.

If this is the first you’re hearing about Free, check out Sister Diane’s podcast with Paul Overton, her post over at Make & Meaning, Paul’s post over there, and my post here. We’ll be discussing the business of Free — giving stuff (information, samples, services, friendliness, inspiration) away for fun and sometimes profit.

If this is the first time you’re hearing about a live blog, I’ll steal what Paul wrote and paste it here in explanation:

A Live Blog is a conversation that happens in real-time, on a webpage, at a specified time. Often, live blogs are used to disseminate up to the minute information on product launches and keynote speeches, but we see the opportunity to use them as a live forum in this case, allowing you, the reader to join the conversation so we can get a true “back and forth” dialogue going. If our little experiment works, you can look forward to a lot more where this came from.

Got questions? Fire away. I really hope you’ll join us next week.

(And also? I feel like a rockstar with my name on that banner Paul made. Just wanted to mention that.)

Free Thinking Live Blog @ Make & Meaning is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

The internet is like a gigantic arts and crafts playground, gallery, inspiration board, employment service and collaboration space.  No matter what your goal, no matter what you create with fibre, a world awaits online.  Learn about what you can do with a blog or website, with digital photography, with words and with passion.  You don’t need to have experience online.  Come with lots of questions and prepare for lots of discussion.

Fibres West is a fibre festival, so there should be some adorable animals, wool and yarn in great abundance!

Upcoming Lecture: Blogging & Internets & Fibre is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

Surprise the first: It felt amazing to be amongst my people. Yarn people. It had been a long time, and I hadn’t even realized I missed them. I’m not sure the guild in Bellingham knows how special it is. There were, like, 50 or 60 people there, on a holiday! And most of them didn’t go to see me, they just went to their monthly guild meeting. There wasn’t an unfriendly face in the bunch. Sitting with them during their meeting I felt like I’d always been there. Insert cliches of warmth and fuzziness here.

Surprise the second: We had a lovely and lively discussion. This is like the holy grail for people like me, who go around speaking to groups. It’s rare to get a crowd that big for a crochet talk. Most of the groups I’ve spoken to on book tours have been less than a third that size. You need a critical mass to have a good discussion, and it made my insides dance with glee when people spoke up and shared their thoughts and questions. Usually I have to fall back on talking a lot and waving my arms about (not that I didn’t do a lot of that, too).

Surprise the third: Even though there was a huge wait at the border on the way home, I would totally go back to a guild meeting in Bellingham on a Wednesday night. Even though I feel hungover this morning for no reason other than that apparently this is how people in their 30s feel when they’ve stayed out too late on a work night.

I’ll tell you what doesn’t surprise me, now that it’s the morning after. The morning after the surprises, it makes perfect sense to me that I feel happy after reconnecting with my community. My pendulum is swinging back to a comfortable central place, where I have my work and I have my play and I have my creativity and I have my crafts and I have my people. The people being the most important part, just as they’ve always been.

So thank you, weavers and crocheters and knitters and spinners of Whatcom County. You have given me a beautiful gift.

A final note. Here are some links related to things we talked about (please leave a comment to remind me if I’ve forgotten anything):

• Crochet Me (I forgot to mention in all my blathering that I no longer run the site, Interweave does. I still blog there and I still think it’s an incredible community)
• Ravelry (You have to join in order to see the wonderfulness.)
• Seraphina’s Shawl (The pattern I made my grey shawl from. It’s also a great example of how tutorials can help attract people to a pattern/project/website/etc.)
• Weavezine

* I totally want to learn how to weave.

Reconnecting is a post from Kim Werker's blog.

St. James Presbyterian Church
910 14th Street
Bellingham, WA

Whatcom Weavers Guild, Here I Come! is a post from Kim Werker's blog.