Area indie landscape changing
Crafting
compacts and business card cases. The iPhone covers sell for $28, the compacts for $12-$14 and business card cases for $20. (Barber also sells her work on her website, www.sweettoothbags. com.)
She found her way to being a full-time artisan after studying theater at the University of Texas. Though she was studying acting, classes in costume and set design tapped into that deeply seated love of hands-on making she had inherited from her grandparents. Barber handcrafts everything she sells by herself, working out of her small home studio, a room filled with work tables, a pair of sewing machines and stacks of colorful fabric and other materials.
Like many independent Austin artists and artisans, Barber finds the holidays to be her busiest time. But unlike when she first started out consigning her wares at boutiques around the country, it’s pop-up shops and markets that now make up the majority of her sales.
Indeed, similar to the food trailers that emerged in place of brick-andmortar restaurants in the past few years, pop-up retail events and markets now figure more prominently within Austin’s indie retail landscape.
Barber currently has a booth in the Blue Genie Art Bazaar, one of the more original indie holiday markets, that runs through Dec. 24. And every Saturday, she vends at Market at Snack Bar, an outside pop-up market at Snack Bar restaurant on South Congress