And here is another good result born out of the pandemic. Many more people have started using their hands and hearts to make crafts at home.
All those budding artisans who said, “If only I had time, I’d like to get to (fill in the blank)” had their chance.
As people found creative ways to entertain themselves and children during lockdown, pursuing small crafts has become big business.
Craft supply stores like Hobby Lobby and Michaels have seen surprisingly strong sales during the pandemic, and their projections for 2022 remain strong. In 2020, Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade items, more than doubled its revenue, and for the first nine months of 2021, its gross merchandise sales increased 39% from the same period of the previous year, according to Forbes.
Even small craft businesses have felt the boost. “Our business tripled in 2020,” said Leesburg, Va.-based quilt and fabric designer, author and quilting teacher Shannon Brinkley. the world and to develop their craftsmanship. “We grew tremendously because so many people were looking for artistic connection and had free time.”
“When people were stuck at home, they tried to think of new things to do and creative sparks took hold,” said Jeff Herman, editor-in-chief of Lawnstarter, an app that lets users book cleaning services. lawn and outdoors. This month, his company, known for its curious surveys, released its 2022 report on the best cities for crafts. (More on that in a minute.)
“We’ve all seen stories about how many people have put the extra time and money they had during the pandemic into home improvements,” Herman said. “But fewer talked about how they used time and money to improve their homes and quality of life through craftsmanship.”
Indeed, as a society, we have gone from wringing our hands to wringing tie-dye T-shirts and knitting our eyebrows to knitting afghans. Creating crafts has not only helped us pass the time in isolation and distracted us from the troubles of the outside world, but has also made our homes more beautiful and sometimes brought dough.
Kat Kennedy of Newport News, Va., is a good example. “I’ve always loved doing crafts,” she said. But when the pandemic hit, the 34-year-old mother of a 9-year-old son took up finger knitting, a technique that doesn’t use needles.
Her boyfriend, Daniel Hardy, also caught craft fever. After Kennedy dragged him to a few thrift stores, he became interested in old furniture. The 38-year-old medical insurance representative began picking up a few worn but well-made pieces, including cedar dressers, chests and dressers, some of which he found on the street, and learned himself to sand, touch up and restore them. watching YouTube videos. He now sells his refurbished furniture through his online store.
“When the pandemic started, so many things changed,” said Kennedy, who works from home in customer service for a gardening company. “Knitting and furniture restoration occupied our time and made us forget everything that was going on.”
Now back to the smartest cities. According to the Best Cities for Crafters survey, the top five cities are New York, San Francisco, Miami, Seattle, and Paterson, NJ, and the worst, coming in at number 200, was Enterprise, Nevada. But more important than ranking is knowing what to look for in your community to help you succeed in crafting. Here are the qualities researchers have found that can help ignite crafters’ glue guns:
◼️ Access to materials. Having lots of craft supply stores per square mile helped boost a town’s ranking, as did having an abundance of hardware, fabric, and thrift stores.
◼️ Artisan community. Cities where many local artists participated in their Local Artists Sunday — an art shopping event held each November in cities across America — ranked highest, along with those that had many groups of craft meeting.
◼️ Educational opportunities. The more arts and crafts classes a city offers and the more schools that offer arts and crafts classes, the greater the opportunities for artistic growth and enrichment, and the higher a city scores in the ranking.
◼️ Art events. A final measure of a city’s craft potential is the number of arts events, including craft fairs and art festivals, that a city hosts each year. Whether you tap into a creative community online or in person, artists do best when they engage with other artists.
Join me next week as we talk about what every crafting room should have.
Marni Jameson is the author of six books on home and lifestyle, including “What to do with everything you own to leave the legacy you want”.
