PARTY TRAIN: The Deptford Project, a 1960s train carriage redesigned by Studio Myerscough into an organic restaurant, is
a permanent installation at the annual Deptford Design Festival in London.
AUGUST
Melbourne Stencil Festival, Australia
It’s ten days of street art and stencil celebration.
Events include live spraying demos and an auction
of festival-created pieces. stencilfest.net
Buskerfest, Toronto
See crafty aerialists, body painters, and offbeat artisans, such as the sculptor who transforms candy
into fish shapes. The lack of scheduling promotes
spontaneity, but you can likely count on some type
of flame show as well. torontobuskerfest.com
SEPTEMBER
Mid-Autumn Festival, Singapore
This harvest festival honors the moon god with
ornamental dragons nibbling on mooncakes,
and a celebration that combines Chinese lanterns
with those resembling pop-culture icons.
2008lanternfestival.com.sg
along the runway amid an awesome display of
performance art. worldofwearableart.com
4 Weeks of FreeDesigndom, Netherlands
Last year’s event featured the Sunday Adventure
Club, an ode to urban pioneers that included an
inner-city garden recreated as an outdoor beauty
parlor, and Urban Play, a showcase for innovative
ideas like movable parks and a carousel-themed
traffic roundabout. freedesigndom.com
OCTOBER
Annual Pumpkin Regatta, Nova Scotia
Sure, there’s the pumpkin weigh-off, pumpkin
carving, and pumpkin painting, but the real crafty
highlight is the regatta where humongous, hollowed-out gourds are made into human-powered, floatable
works of art, then raced along Windsor’s Lake
Pesaquid. worldsbiggestpumpkins.com
Deptford Design Festival, London DECEMBER
This fair showcases artistic talents with events like Noche de los Rábanos, Oaxaca, Mexico
24-Hour Design and Make, where teams of furniture Local artisans craft mariachi figures, flamenco
makers, graphic artists, and textile designers create dancers, and Christmas nativity scenes out of rad-
before a live audience. deptforddesign.co.uk ishes at this Mexican vacation spot. Dried flower
and cornhusk crafting competitions are all part of
the century-old event. craftzine.com/go/radish
World of WearableArt Awards Show,
New Zealand
More than 150 of the world’s most inventive
fashions — ranging from propeller-equipped bras
to Lego-formed tutus to clothing made from human
hair and Tchaikovsky sheet music — are worked
Laura Kiniry is a San Francisco-based freelance writer who’s
busy snapping photos and learning design when she’s not
writing articles and guidebooks.
Photograph by Rebecca Molina
