online community
An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members interact with each other primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests. For many, online communities may fe ...
for
crafting
A craft or trade is a pastime or an occupation that requires particular skills and knowledge of skilled work. In a historical sense, particularly the Middle Ages and earlier, the term is usually applied to people occupied in small scale pr ...
and do it yourself (DIY) enthusiasts. Users post pictures of craft projects they have made and others comment and ask questions about how it was made. The Craftster.org website closed on December 19, 2019.
The site's tagline, "No tea cozies without irony", referred to the fact that many of the projects posted are irreverent, off-beat, humorous, clever, etc. While projects posted on the site tended to be made using traditional techniques such as knitting, crochet,
cross stitch
Cross-stitch is a form of sewing and a popular form of counted-thread embroidery in which X-shaped stitches in a tiled, raster graphics, raster-like pattern are used to form a picture. The stitcher counts the threads on a piece of even-weave, ev ...
and
sewing
Sewing is the craft of fastening or attaching objects using stitches made with a sewing needle and thread. Sewing is one of the oldest of the textile arts, arising in the Paleolithic era. Before the invention of spinning yarn or weaving fab ...
they often conveyed modern sentiments such as images of a favorite rock band, or motifs from a favorite 1980s video game.
The site had over 190,000 registered members. It has been written up in publications such as ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...
'', ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'', ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'', and ''
The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
''.
The membership was over 190,000, and readership was 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 programmerLeah Kramer. The term "Craftster" is a
portmanteau
A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsNapster and
Friendster
Friendster was a social network game based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003.Eric Eldon, August 4, 2008.Friendster raises $20 million, nabs a Googler to be CEO VentureBeat. Retrieved December 4, 2 ...
. Prior to starting the site, Kramer was one of the organizers of the
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
Bazaar Bizarre, a yearly "punk rock craft fair", begun in 2001.