Featured vendor - Arts Street Textile Studio

Arts Street Textile Studio: handmade with the homeless is a highly interactive community fiber studio and gallery teaching a wide variety of fiber arts - weaving, knitting, crochet, sewing, quilting, and embroidery - to the homeless and other individuals transitioning from homelessness or recovery in Philadelphia. The studio and classes are also open to participation by the broader community. Through our activities we aim to:

• increase the visibility of our homeless colleagues within the larger community, dignify their efforts to acquire productive skills as artisans and express themselves artistically in a public setting, and enlarge the broader humanity of the community by our collaborative artistic efforts;

• foster greater emotional well-being, intellectual processing, and self-esteem through the learning and practice of traditional fiber arts;

• provide a welcoming space for homeless and transitional artists to explore a wide variety of crafts in the company of other experienced artists and the community at large;

• develop new avenues for self-sufficiency by creating hand-made items to sell commercially; and

• build a community of textile artists at all skill levels.

Our website is: http://www.textilesforchange.org.

We can also be found on facebook under Arts Street Textile Studios.

And make sure to come by the festival to visit with them!