In My Studio: Quality Control

Sarah with a basket making group in Northern Namibia

I was lucky enough to work in Namibia in Southern Africa for 3 years helping crafts people to make and sell products for the burgeoning tourism industry.

The crafts were mainly made from natural resources such as basketry, wood carving and pottery. I helped to design products they could make which would both appeal to tourists and be easily transported.

One of the main problems with the products was maintaining good quality control. As one way to illustrate this for people who spoke many different languages we came up with a list of '10 Commandments For Making Quality Craft Products'. 

I was looking at this the other day and was amazed how relevant  it is to crafts people everywhere- including us. So I thought I would share these Namibian 10 Commandments so we can all keep in mind the importance of quality control and to remember that we are only a small part of a much larger community of crafts people working all over the world.

 Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten. Gucci Family Slogan


Good Luck and Good Making!

by Sarah Omura, SO Handmade

www.etsy.com/shop/SOhandmade1

What You Have to Know About CPSC

by Lyudmila Klebansky (WoolSolution)

I promised few days ago to collect, sort and post info about CPSC.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has jurisdiction over many types of consumer products, from coffee makers, to toys, to lawn mowers, to fireworks.
After all reading I cannot tell you that I completely understand the CPSIA when the CPSC itself has been giving conflicting information about what is required. Like 99.9% of the legislation that is passed by Congress, the CSPIA is written in convoluted legalese and most of the representatives I guess didn’t read it.

Two years ago, President Bush signed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act into law, giving vast new powers to CPSC and promising wondrous new levels of "safety" for children in our country. The CPSC regulations required every manufacturer, importer or private labeler of a children's product to have their product tested for phthalate and lead by an accredited independent testing lab and certified. Etsy had been warning for months that many of its artists and craftspeople members might not be able stay in business "due to the burdensome cost of testing and certification pursuant to the proposed legislation."

Well, we all want to make safe and good quality handmade goods and without going nuts about all the rules I’ll give you a quick overview and few links to help you find info related to your product.

Make sure you use safe items, such as fabrics, yarns, polyfil, paints, glues sold in the U.S. You can always check the list of Regulated Products http://www.cpsc.gov/businfo/reg.html. Put as much information as possible on the labels and warning tags. Put all what you know about materials in the items description.

Etsy tries to keep artists and crafters updated on the latest CPSIA information. You can find all publications at http://www.etsy.com/storque/search/title/CPSIA/ As well as numerous forums threads dedicated to this topic. I found very useful today’s post at http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6601010


The CPSC has integrated social media “share” functionality into each product recall notice so you can easily post items of interest to your Twitter or Facebook pages.

Products Under the Jurisdiction of Other Federal Agencies and Federal links http://www.cpsc.gov/federal.html