The main objective of the Guimarães Handicraft Fair is to promote handicraft activities, trying to preserve the arts and ancient techniques and simultaneously with an approach on new tendencies of contemporary handicraft. Aiming at putting in contact different artists and different design tendencies it also tries to give visitors a diversity of design and territorial representation. The handicraft fair of Guimarães is a market place of handicraft products and an important mean of product selling.

date: 17th-20th May
place: Multiusos de Guimarães
org: A Oficina
tel. 253 424 700
fax 253 420 710

e-mail: geral@aoficina.pt
www.aoficina.pt

Guimarães embroidery is manual work using cotton thread and pieces of linen fabric.  It used to be seen solely in Guimarães but has spread to surrounding areas, particularly the neighbouring county of Felgueiras.  It is an old tradition, although difficult to pin-point its beginning.  However the name "Guimarães Embroidery" appeared for the first time in the 1940s.

It is known that the origins of the embroidery are rural, being one of the stages of the linen-making process, which, after the agricultural cycle and the preparation of the thread, was spun and woven and finally embroidered by peasant women.  The most valued pieces made were men's shirts, decorated usually with geometric patters and the women's corsets, embroidered with diverse decorative motifs.

The colours most in use today are off-white, white, red and dark blue.  Black is also used on occasion.

The embroidery is completely original, either the type of flowers embroidered is different or the importance of the trimming in relation to the whole, the use of different sized needles as well as the originality of the design plays a part in the originality.

Characteristics: Over the last 200 years, Guimarães embroidery has been made, using cotton thread on hand-made linen, it is delicate and involves much hard work.  This embroidery shows how women introduced colour and joy into their lives by embroidering clothes, sheets, towels, linings for baskets.

Pottery is one of the most interesting arts in Guimarães' long tradition.  It is a purely rustic craft activity and has existed for many centuries, its origins being traced to the 13th Century.  In Guimarães, the Lugar da Cruz de Pedra was one of the centres of this activity, which formerly flourished.

Of all the pottery made in Guimarães, the most famous is the "Lovers' Pitcher", which is still made in the ovens at Cruz de Pedra.