Having the perfect stall

















Folksy has a great article giving advice on craft fairs.

"WOW!… That’s the sort of reaction most of us would like to hear as someone spots our craft stall. If you have spent time and effort creating beautiful handmade items for sale, allow enough time to plan your display and do justice to your hard work. A display should compliment and highlight your work – here are a few of the most important factors to consider:"

Click here to read more.








The Liverpool Design Festival was launched in November 2009 as a new annual design and contemporary craft festival in Liverpool.
In 2009 the Festival incorporated, in its first year, over a dozen events in Liverpool city centre and wider Merseyside area and nearly 8000 people visited or participated in exhibitions, workshops, debates and talks and the Festival saw hundreds of designers from across the UK showcase their work.













The 2010 Festival, building on the success of the previous year’s events, celebrates and promotes quality design, encouraging an appreciation of craft and design by the widest possible audience, providing opportunities for participation, particularly by young people, in design and artistic appreciation whilst also supporting new and emerging practitioners.

The Liverpool Design Festival will run from the 18th November to 27th November 2010.

What a pretty shop window!!


















I discovered this pretty shop on a side street in Preston. It was next door to a lovely deli, opposite Pizza Express and Forum which does tasty fish finger sandwiches!

It was closed when I found it but what an exciting shop window! I can't wait to make a trip back to Preston to pop in and have a look. Click here for their website.

Super Duper Fair Publicity from 13.07.10













Blackpool Gazette Article on Super Duper Fair from their 13.07.10 edition of EVE (look at page 6)  Click here to see.

Grants for Crafts

















Above: Artwork by Helen Musselwhite

The David Canter Memorial Fund

Call for applications for craft awards in the disciplines of paper, calligraphy and lettercutting.

The David Canter Memorial Fund offers awards to give financial assistance to those working in the crafts. Grants, which usually range between £500 and £1,000, are available to those who have finished their formal training, and are working full or part-time in the UK, but need funds for special projects such as setting up a workshop, buying equipment, or for research and travel.

Click here to read more...

Super Duper Success!!

A big thank you to the stallholders who braved the rain and travelled fair distances to be at the Super Duper Fair yesterday. It was a fantastic day and the fair looked amazing! Comments from visitors were extremley positive, in particular picking up on the quality of the handmade things and each stalls beautiful presentation.  Thank you as well to the visitors that came to peruse and spend their pennies. We had over one thousand people visit our fair and they came from far and wide too, one couple came from Fife!

If you were there yesterday, I hope you have dried off and are enjoying your very special purchases.
I have selected a few images from the day to give you a flavour of the fun we had. Enjoy.



























fair on today!!


















The Super Duper Fair is taking place today from 12-4pm at Stanley Park (near the bandstand). 
There will be lots of beautiful handmade things for sale, so ignore the summer drizzles and come down for some wholesome shopping. 

rain rain go away....














..... no worries, we will be in these beautiful marquees from
North West Capri Marquees Bring on the sunshine!

Amazing vintage weekend!












Vintage at Goodwood
Vintage music, film, fashion, art, dancing, comedy and so much more. It is a lush line up of acts playing over the weekend, including; the legend Sandie Shaw, Martha and the Vandellas and the Noisettes. Love their website! They have loads of events and workshops like how to make bunting, knitting, making 50's and 60's clothes. They even have a fair! The accomodation available is a very nice touch. You can stay in a gypsy caravan, PodPads, BellPads, yurts and they are all amazing.











The weekend begins on Thursday the 12th of August and ends on the Monday.

Get your tickets now!! Click here for the Vintage at Goodwood website

Grundy's super duper exhibitions















Above: Brian Griffiths, 'Beneath the Stride of Giants', 2004. wood
Collection The Saatchi Gallery, London. Commissioned by Camden Arts Centre, London
Extra Ordinary
Blackpool has an important history of sideshow and fairground entertainment, which showcased the exotic, the amazing and the bizarre. With a resurgence in the popularity of such entertainment in recent years Extra Ordinary purposefully sets out to embrace this culture, looking at magic, horror, clairvoyance and spectacle, but removes its focus from the exotic to include artworks that find the extraordinary within the mundane.
The exhibition brings together artworks formed from everyday objects, or familiar routines and experiences repositioned to become absurd or magical. It includes Brian Griffths' 'Beneath the Stride of Giants', a vast maritime vessel, part real part mythical, constructed of salvaged furniture and discarded material.















Above:'Adam' being transported from London to Blackpool, 1939.
Image courtesy the Local and Family History Centre, Blackpool Central Library
Jacob Epstein and Blackpool
Jacob Epstein’s carving ‘Adam’ was first shown in Blackpool during the 1939 summer holiday season. During this time Jacob Epstein was a household name, synonymous with the negative opinions aimed at modern art. His works of Biblical subjects incorporating nakedness and sexuality were sensationalised by the press. The showing of 'Adam' was to be the start of a fascinating relationship between Epstein’s work and Blackpool that would stretch to 1961.
Jacob Epstein and Blackpool looks back at these showings through a selection of the press coverage that was generated at the time to revaluate the events and reveal that they were not the freak shows at the fairground they have been branded by art critics and commentators in recent times, but a story of the clash between Modernist high art and popular culture.


For more information on these exhibitions, please follow this link: Grundy Art Gallery/Exhibitions

Supercollider Exhibition















The New Zero by Yaron Lapid at Supercollider from 17th July - 1st August.
The New Zero is an expanded project which uses both traditional photographic techniques and video to interrogate and examine the role of photography in relation to our understanding of the world and its ability to assemble and disassemble layers of history.
The project centres around Lapid’s 1999 discovery of several envelopes on the floor of a newly demolished photographic studio in Jerusalem. The ambiguous envelopes contained hundreds of black and white photographs and negatives.
For The New Zero Lapid has developed and reprocessed the found material, creating an atypical ‘family album’ across separate methods of presentation.
(Text adapted from an original text by Gaia Tedone)
supercollider / contemporary art projects
2ND FLOOR / 32 Clifton Street / Blackpool / Lancashire / FY1 1JP
HOURS: SAT / SUN 11 AM - 2 PM (or by prior appointment only)*
*currently supercollider does not open on week days. Regrettably there is no disabled access at this time. Please accept our unreserved apologies for any inconvenience and/or offence caused. It is not the intention of supercollider to exclude anyone.

Get 'Knitty Gritty'














Do you knit? Are you part of a knitting group?
Would you be interested in knitting squares with letters of the poem 'Why?' by  John Siddique Poetry, for Blackpool's fourth annual Wordpool literature festival in October? (The knitted squares will be assembled into a giant blanket and acutioned off for charity.)
What is needed? Knitting or crochet groups or individuals who can commit to producing a line from the poem by mid September. This could be an opportunity for a textile/craft group to form in your area or for existing textile groups to work with others.
Why Get Involved?
• This is a great opportunity for residents of Blackpool to get involved in the exciting Wordpool Literature Festival
• Meet other people in Blackpool with similar interests.
• The finished piece will be auctioned off for a worthwhile cause.
• Knitting is the new rock'n'roll!
• It's a great way to teach others our great heritage of knitting.
For more details or to sign up contact:
Clancy Mason
Tel: 01253 478266
Wordpool