Packing every day for the past week means needing to take some breaks to stay sane. So yesterday I went over to the Urban Craft Uprising event at the Seattle Center. The choice of the Seattle Center's Exhibition Hall building felt like a strange one. The hall was far from full, with a lot of space around the fair to walk the perimeter of the room, and big pockets of unused space - compounded by the density of hundreds of visitors packed into what must have been about 6-8 rows of what was about 50-75 vendors.

I didn't take photos as a lot of these craft artists have original ideas, designs and concepts that I imagine at least some of them being propietary about. Popular trends noted: plush and crochet toys and dolls in food shapes with faces such as marshmallows, cookies, and cotton candy, hardboiled eggs, and drumsticks. Shmancy does a lot with pins of empanada turnovers, hardboiled eggs, carrots, and fortune cookies. I really liked this idea - soft handmade toys with a touch of creativity to coax children into eating or trying new foods. Comfort food.

My favorite find, which I didn't buy, but was meanly tempted to, was a rollable pouch targeted towards kids. The best comparison I can make is to picture a rolled cloth that has a holder for a variety of tools - Kort's got such a pouch for his chakra energy tuning forks. Each fork fits snugly into its own niche within this fabric pouch which can then be rolled up to make the tools easily portable. Picture this design applied on a smaller scale, to a set of children's crayons. Colorful printed cotton cloth decorated with cars and trains holding seven individual crayons in place. Portable, light, and secure.

The jewelry makers I saw are doing a lot with objects encased in resin, glass buttons and marbles as rings/neckalces. The best jewelry I saw was made by Faryn Davis of Fernworks who embeds fern fragments, leaves and other natural materials into her one-of-a-kind pieces.