No matter thunderstorm, stifling heat or Cleveland snow storm, the craft show must go on.
That’s the way Martha Latta, the 30-year-old do-it-yourself crafter extraordinaire behind
Sunday Afternoon Housewife, sees it, anyway.
“Always bring an extra pair of socks and T-shirt,” Latta, who lives in north east Indianapolis, says with a laugh. “Be prepared for everything.”
Sunday Afternoon Housewife, a moniker that Latta picked up in 2004 when she and a friend started a zine, now represents a blog of “handmade goods and unsolicited advice” and her business.
Latta, a part-time instructor at a local community college who travels around the country to sell her goods at craft shows, also sells her Scrabble tile pendants on her website. The tiles each have a vintage-inspired image on the blank side of the tile with the Scrabble letter visible on the back. The image is coated in resin to give the necklace a shiny, glass-like appearance. She’s also the force behind a growing Indiana-centric T-shirt business.
The necklaces and T-shirts, which are also sold in stores from Cincinnati to Dallas, are the latest in a line of creating that started when Latta was in high school. She’s experimented with wood burning, leather work, beading, paper making, photography, embroidery and sewing.
The skills, she says, she inherited from her mother and grandmothers.
“One is a really good quilter and cook – I get all of my cooking skills from my dad’s mom,” Latta says. “My other grandma, she does beautiful needlework, cross-stitch, embroidery, knitting and crochet. My mom never settled on one thing. … She’s on a mosaic phase now.”
For the month of December, Latta is working a pop-up shop at a gallery in Indianapolis that features work from 45 different artists. She’s using it to “get my toes in the water of retail” although she isn’t committed to opening her own shop just yet.
Next for Latta? Who knows, she says.
“I don’t know that I’ll be making necklaces for the rest of my life,” Latta says. “I’m doing really well with the T-shirt line and thinking that in the next year I’ll be expanding that, doing more things that are general instead of city-centric.”
Interested in her work? Latta has her goods on sale in at least two Cincinnati boutiques;
Fabricate in Northside and
Red Tree Gallery on Madison Road.
By Taylor Dungjen
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