A Couple More Things

There are just a couple more things I want to blog about from our DC trip last week. I discovered a really cool store called Ten Thousand Villages on King Street in Alexandria. I've never heard of this chain of stores before and I don't think we have any in NJ. It's an awesome concept that they've come up with...selling handcrafted items made by people in 3rd world countries. Here's a couple of sentences from their vission and mission statements...

" Ten Thousand Villages provides vital, fair income to Third World people by marketing their handicrafts and telling their stories in North America. Ten Thousand Villages works with artisans who would otherwise be unemployed or underemployed. This income artisans earn helps pay for food, education, health care and housing."

Check out their website to see some of their items. They truly had some beautiful pieces of art, jewelery, and clothing. Not to mention all kinds of other fun stuff. I picked up a couple of things from The Women's Bean Project.

On our way home we stopped in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood to take a peek at a craft fair I found advertised. Crafty Bastards was a unique, alternative craft show with dozens of items I've never seen at the standard run of the mill crafty event. Here's a couple of pics we took...