Remember twenty years ago? – drop outs and love-ins and hippies, and young Americans coming to Canada in protest against a misbegotten war? At the beginning of the Seventies one of those Americans, a young man called Gene Miller, came to Victoria. His great interest was the performing arts, but all the arts were grist to his mill and they came together when he found a building with plenty of rentable space for theatre groups with a play to perform, or artists seeking a gallery, or craftspeople in need of a market square. He called it Open Space. It is here the Circle Craft story begins.
In 1972 a craft market was held at Open Space. A young woman of Danish origin brought her clothing, block-printed with her own designs – kaftans, loose shirts, that kind of thing. Her name was Yetta Lees. She did well enough to take part in a second fair and pertinent to the Circle Craft story is that this experience triggered a personal revelation. “It is very simple,” she says. “I learned I was not as good a craftswoman as many of the exhibitors. But I had something else they lacked; I was a better organizer. They were handicapped by the lack of it, and the strong hippy influence didn’t help any. So the fairs were only attracting people like themselves. This meant they were simply selling their beautiful work to themselves and each other; but themselves and each other hadn’t much money, and to make matters worse the haphazard hippy atmosphere put off the affluent mainstream people they needed.”