By Amanda Garrett
Beacon Journal staff writer
A moth hole in the tweed of her husband’s suit jacket led Jennifer Couch to an art project that has evolved into a business.
The jacket couldn’t be saved, but Couch didn’t want to throw away the beautiful tweed, so she figured out how to turn the fabric into a handbag — reusing the buttons, pockets and cuffs as decoration.
Now, seven years later, the Akron woman saves suits that would otherwise be put in a landfill and turns then into purses, computer bags and totes, sewing in a hidden layer of denim between the tweed and bag lining for strength and attaching seat-belt strapping as a durable, adjustable shoulder strap.
This weekend, Couch (her business is called Jenci) is among 75 artisans and craft makers selling their goods at Akron’s eighth annual holiday Crafty Mart. Vendors are spread over three downtown venues within blocks of each other: the Akron Art Museum, Summit Artspace and Musica, a warehouse-turned-music club.
Saturday’s Crafty Mart felt like the anti-Black Friday. Instead of fighting for bargains on mass-produced items made thousands of miles away, shoppers were hunting for locally made items and talking to the men and women who produced them.
Sue Belopotosky, 69, and her daughter, Jean Byers, 46, pulled back their coat sleeves and revealed matching finds from Liz Stutzman’s vintageliz in Musica. The hand-dyed, blue leather bracelets wrap twice around their wrists before fastening with a large silver shackle that looks sort of like a horseshoe.
“She cut them to fit each of us,” Byers said. Both mother and daughter said they have tiny wrists and bracelets often fall off. They were thrilled to find something cut to fit while they waited.
Belopotosky, a retired nurse, said it’s also thrilling to shop local, especially when they can buy gifts that help a good cause. After their annual stop for handbags at Couch’s Jenci, they were headed to the booth of Not Wasted, a nonprofit jobs training program helping women who have been incarcerated or recovering from addiction.
Belopotosky and Byers wanted to see what the women had made out of old billboards.
Every vendor has a story.
Daena Urbanski started her business — ReGeeked — after she tried to find a good wallet made out of comic books.
Everything she found was poor quality, just glued together.
Urbanski made her own wallet by hand-laminating comics and then using a sewing machine and red thread to stitch it together. She gave a couple to her friends, too, and they urged her to go into business. She started selling at one craft show five years ago, now she does 10.
Her table Saturday was filled with one-of-a-kind wallets made from dozens of vintage and modern comics — from Batman and Superman to Speed Racer and Star Wars. Like many of the Crafty Mart makers, Urbanski creates what she sells mostly from items — damaged comics — that would otherwise be thrown away.
Kim Eggleston-Kraus snared a spot for her business, Tindercraft Ceramics, just inside the door of the Akron Art Museum. Handcrafted mugs, platters and vases filled most of her space, but she left enough room for a small army of what she calls her “happy monsters,” egg-shaped, faceless creatures that each have a unique mouth.
Eggleston-Kraus — who also teaches ceramics at Kent State University’s Stark campus and Archbishop Hoban High School — came up with the monsters a few years ago near Halloween when she was experimenting with jack-o’-lanterns.
To create different colors and textures, she wraps some of the monsters in copper wire and aluminum foil before baking them two days in an in-ground pit. Others are heated to 1830 degrees before she plunges him into a metal canister filled with straw.
“Crafty Mart does a great job of billing itself as having high-quality, idiosyncratic things,” she said. “These are things you wouldn’t find in a mall on Black Friday.”
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.