Lifestyles

If you're looking to deck your home with crocheted toilet paper covers, wood-burned lawn decorations depicting a chubby woman's rear end, or a plaque with the cross-stiched "Home Sweet Home" on it, go hang out with your grandma.

If hand-sewn plush dolls more edgy than cuddly, cartoony screen-printed concert posters and valentines with a nerdy ghost promising, "I'm going to write about you on my blog!" are more up your alley, check out the Handmade Arcade on Saturday.

The third showing of the craft show that embodies the do-it-yourself, indie creations of a nationwide craft revolution will feature 116 vendors from across the country who promise anything and everything except the kind of knickknacks that collect dust on ordinary mantles.

"Every time I've been there, I've seen new crafts that inspire me to want to learn new things, while the old-school (craft shows) are things your grandmother could show you how to do," says Claire Litton, a 26-year-old crafter from Squirrel Hill whose Bellydancer Bookworks will be featured at Handmade Arcade.

Litton borrowed library books to learn how to make hand-bound journals four years ago after she got fed up with buying notebooks that fell apart. She started selling her "standard paperback-sized" journals with her designs at last year's Handmade Arcade.

"Bookbinding itself is really an old craft. It's by no means a modern thing at all, but the kind of quirky creativity that comes from using things that you didn't even think you could use and turning them into artwork," says Litton, a self-described "paper addict" who collects collage materials for her designs at specialty stores and book sales across the country as she travels to competitions as a professional belly dancer.

Litton's handcrafted creations personifies the spirit of the new craft culture that Handmade Arcade is all about.

"I look at this craft subculture as a kind of people who are doing traditional crafts, and having an appreciation for traditional crafts, but bringing an artistic sensibility to them, meaning that they're always trying to do something a little bit different," says Elizabeth Clare Prince, an organizer of Handmade Arcade.

"Whether it's do-it-yourself crafts, do-it-yourself haircuts, or making your own music -- it's something that people yearn for or yearn to create something original that's never been done before and probably can't be reproduced," says Gloria Forouzan, a Lawrenceville crafter created Handmade Arcade in 2004 to find an outlet for the kind of crafts she and her friends were making.

"I really didn't know about this subculture at all," says Forouzan, who crafts with paper and magazine images to decorate boxes.

The crafting revolution has taken hold in Pittsburgh since the first Handmade Arcade featured 32 vendors and drew about 1,000 customers two years ago. The number of vendors more than doubled at the show the year after, and 4,000 Pittsburghers came to check out the indie craft fair. This year's show is at a bigger, more open space in Point Breeze's Construction Junction.

Visitors to the show can line up for free DIY haircuts to be coifed on the spot by a woman with no beauty school training but a lot of imagination. Food at the fair will be from Hot Dogma, Coca Cafe and Emmacakes, independent women-owned businesses, and several disc jockeys will spin everything from corny Christmas carols to new genres of music.

Handmade Arcade draws an assortment of customers, says Forouzan.

"It's a great place to people watch. The age range is amassing from young hipster types, to young moms, to grandmas and grandpas."

The crafters of the subculture usually can fit into a neater category, but they're as diverse as the creations they design.

"It definitely tends to be 20- to 30-year-old city dwelling folks; probably 75 percent are women and 25 percent are men. Beyond that, it really runs the gamut from college kids to parents who are married with kids. I don't know if there's a typical DIY crafter," says Alison Simonian, a 29-year-old who's full-time job is designing and creating boldly colored handmade vinyl bags, wallets and belts for her Chicago-based Miss Alison.

Mike Budai works for Mercy Behavioral Health by day, and designs and screen prints bright cartoony concert posters, art prints and T-shirts at any chance he gets.

"It's a hobby that's another full-time job," says the 29-year-old Whitehall resident.

Budai was a vendor at last year's Handmade Arcade, and says he noticed that there was "definitely a lack of men.

"I also think there's a lack of things that would draw a lot of men's interest. ... You see a lot of purses and jewelry and hair clips."

He feels perfectly at home in the indie craft subculture, however.

"I don't think that I stand out necessarily because I'm a guy doing it. I think more that what you do stands out more than who you are," he says.

The array of people and designs creates opportunities for collaboration within the subculture. The "cuddlers" that are hand-sewn by a brother-and-sister team who created Mr. Pickles in Columbus, Ohio, are nothing you'd find next to the Beanie Babies and teddy bears in the stuffed animal aisle. When co-creator Rita Volpi wanted to organize a "plush art show" where she could display the company's stuffed Mr. Pickles, Rotten Apple, Nerd Ghost and plastic-wrapped T-Bone characters, other subculture creators teamed up to help her make Plush Rush happen.

"People just want to pitch in," Volpi says.

When collaboration doesn't work between artists, mutiny always is an option. Joy Cooney of Silver Spring, Md., makes jewelry and purses with a "pin-up-girl, rockabilly aesthetic." She's a member of The Craft Mutiny, a collective of Washington D.C.-area crafters who don't have much in common besides the fact that they appreciate one another's creations.

"Like minded crafters believe they can do things themselves," Cooney says.

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