Handmade Faire – NJ – Craft Gossip

Watch out, New Jersey! Burlington County’s most cutting edge art and craft show – The Handmade Faire – Summer of Love is coming at you soon. The festival will take place on Saturday, July 18, 2009 from 10am-4pm at Freedom Park in Medford, NJ. This event will go on rain or shine, and is free and open to the public. There will be goodie bags – a reusable screen printed tote full of coupons for the vendors, samples, treats and more for the first 100 shoppers starting at 10:00. Also, throughout the day there will be giveaways of a variety of items to random shoppers.

Expect to see the most talented emerging artists from the local, regional, and expanded Indie art scene. Last year’s show welcomed artisans from as local as Medford to as far away as Maine. HF welcomes 100 of the most unique, talented and creative artists with a large variety of products and specialties including clothing, jewelry, paper goods, children’s items, ceramics, and more. Items will cover a wide range of budgets and prices so everyone can leave happy! Go here for more information about artists and vendors.

Mason jars are fun to craft with, use for storage or even use to hold gifts like baking mixes or sugar scrubs. But you can make your jars even cuter — no matter what you’re using them for — by adding a bit of cross stitch to the lid.

This idea comes from Gathered, and while they are showing examples of Mason jars used for storage in the craft room, you can use these throughout the house. I’m also thinking you could do this as a way to fancy up a traditional Mason jar sewing kit, since there’s already a little batting under the piece of cross stitch you could still use it as a pincushion.

The post walks you through how to make a cross stitched Mason jar lids and a link to a PDF pattern that includes six design options.

They’re not totally for beginners because they include cross stitch, backstitch, eyelets and Rhodes stitch, but if you aren’t familiar with those techniques you can either leave them off or there’s a stitch diagram in the PDF to help you.

Either way these designs are cute and relatively quick to stitch in whatever colors you like. It’s easy to turn them into jar toppers, or you could even just use the Mason jar ring as a frame rather than using it on top of a jar (I did this with a little Christmas tree cross stitch pattern I turned into an ornament).

They’re super cute in the pastel colors shown, or work in red and green for more of a holiday look if you’re using them for gift giving.

Check out the instructions and grab the free patterns for these jar toppers at Gathered. Once you start stitching I’m sure you’ll come up with all sorts of things you want to store or gift in jars so that you can make more of them!

[Photo: Gathered]

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