Great list. You have to laugh. I know I do, and I frequent craft venues here in New England and wherever I travel.
People's comments are priceless ...the ones who will pay an astronomical sum for a little piece of some junky leftover things willy-nilly glued together and called art, and the ones who are afraid they'll get contaminated by beautiful hand-made products that didn't come from a department store, and the ones who can't tell a pot which should have been a glazing reject from one done right...not to mention the lovingly hand-knitted pom-pommed slippers my grandmother made us all make for the church bazaar....or those imported sweaters of rough animal-smelly twig-entwined hand-knit allergens...crafts are a mixed bag, but all enjoyable in their way and some simply priceless in their beauty.
But remember when tempted to swat someone (boy I've wanted to whack a few myself), these people at the fair showed up for some reason, not just to wear out their shoe leather stalking the booths and mocking the products, and maybe they just need someone of infinite patience to bring them along and make them feel like they are buying something special made just for them.
Take quilts. If you didn't grow up with them, quilts are really weird ... not a nice hand-woven wool or cashmere or silk blanket... or puffy like a comforter, full of warm feathers...or even practical like an electric blanket or one of those Hudson Bay type blankets.
And they are all made of little pieces of material which used to be perfectly good fabric until someone sliced it up in neat little shapes and sewed it back together in a way that supposedly won't fall apart into ragged little shapes, then sandwiched it with something in the middle, all of which work costs a lot of extra money. Don't even go into quilt history or try to explain the trend to heavy quilting if the customer doesn't know whether you made the cute flower fabric itself, or just sewed it all up.
If you can explain the contradictions and complexity of quilts, maybe you'll be able to create a new quilt-lover.
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: