About Us

THE CIRCLE CRAFT CHRISTMAS MARKET

Is a premier showcase of excellence in Canadian craft and design, encompassing traditional, contemporary, one-of-kind, and production works.

The market was first held at what is now the East Vancouver Cultural Centre.
Yetta Lees, who created clothing block-printed with her own designs, had previously held a successful fabric festival in Victoria when she was approached by a friend of a friend, Chris Wooten, to do a Christmas craft show in Vancouver.
She said the hippie artists’ sales had to be “made places where mainstream people would feel comfortable” and stipulated “no dope of any kind, no big dogs and no breastfeeding in publice,” Thelma Ruck Keene wrote in a 1990 essay on its history.

Lees and Wooten sent out hand-written invitations and worried that no one would come. They were shocked when 500 came, and Lees realized she had “stumbled across a need,” according to Keene’s account posted to the Circle Craft website.

“The Most Successful and Enduring Craft Co-operative in Canada”

Originally written in 1990 by Thelma Ruck Keene

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.”