Crafts in Finland

The exhibition organizers are busy to arrange craft fairs  around the year in Finland. In a country with 5 million inhabitants there are several national shows every year, dozens of local shows and a few special international shows. Thousands of Finns are visiting these fairs and no question why. Huge amount of Finns work with craft daily or they spend their leisure time sewing, knitting, making jewelry, any kind of craft.

Internet has provided a new possibilities to find materials, ideas, inspiration. A lot of Finns are ordering their materials from Internet, using wholesalers around Europe or individual seller in Etsy or Artfire. Anyhow, there has been quite a lot of barriers for Finns to find suppliers abroad. Finland belongs to European Union and there are custom regulations if ordering from outside of EU. Even Finns are taught English at school, many of them don't have necessary language skills to find suppliers or to order goods. Also payment is one barrier: a lot of Finns just don't have credit card or they are worried about using card in Internet.

Even though finding suppliers is not always easy task, Finns still expand variety of craft supplies sold by local resellers. Many of crafters have started their business selling first their own work, buing materials in Internet just to notice, that supplying materials to other Finns is worth of work.

One of leading crat is jewelry. There are hundreds of courses every year held in local communities. During last decade beading and making wired jewellery has gotten extremely popular. Every year a lot of jewelry makers are gathering to Ylämaa, where is every year international gemstone show. No wonder, that Finns are keen on jewelry making: one of the most intresting jewelry competition is Lapponia contest, targeted to jewelry designers around the world.

To explore more about Finnish jewelry crafters, visit http://kultalilja.blogspot.com/. Even it is written in Finnish, there are plenty of photos of Finnish style and links to other jewelry makers pages.