Advertising Yes Founded May 2000 | Founder Leah Kramer | |
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Headquarters El Segundo, California, United States Profiles | ||
Craftster is an online community for crafting and do it yourself enthusiasts. Users post pictures of craft projects they have made and others comment and ask questions about how it was made.
The site's tagline, "No tea cozies without irony", refers to the fact that many of the projects posted are irreverent, off-beat, humorous, clever, etc. While projects posted on the site tend to be made using traditional techniques such as knitting, crochet, cross stitch and sewing they often convey modern sentiments such as images of a favorite rock band, or motifs from a favorite 1980s video game.
The site has over 190,000 registered members. It has been written up in publications such as TIME Magazine, the New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. The membership is over 190,000, and readership is over 1,000,000 unique visitors per month and over 10,000,000-page views per month.
The site has been called be one of the forces behind the renaissance of crafting among a new, young, contemporary demographic.
History
The site was started on June 27, 2003 by crafter and computer programmer Leah Kramer. The term "Craftster" is a portmanteau of "crafty hipster" and a nod to pioneering peer-to-peer sites Napster and Friendster. Prior to starting the site, Kramer was one of the organizers of the Boston Bazaar Bizarre, a yearly "punk rock craft fair," begun in 2001.