Crafts Without Borders

Crafts Without Borders brings a global fair trade perspective to St. Augustine’s Uptown San Marco shopping district, offering handmade artisan goods sourced through direct relationships with makers around the world. Owner Caroline Redding grew up working in her parents’ own handmade and fair trade store, and she has continued that family tradition, traveling internationally to source the jewelry, scarves, wall art, and other artisan pieces that fill the shop.

Redding herself is a skilled tatting artist, a traditional lace making technique using knots and loops to create intricate jewelry and textile pieces, and her own handcrafted tatting jewelry sits alongside the imported fair trade goods, giving the shop a personal, owner made dimension that few gift shops can offer. That combination, curated global sourcing plus genuine handcraft from the owner, distinguishes the shop from typical import stores that simply resell mass produced items with a vague fair trade label attached without real relationships behind the sourcing.

The product mix leans toward jewelry, scarves, and wall art, categories that travel well as gifts and souvenirs while representing distinct artisan traditions from the countries where they originate. Because fair trade sourcing means paying artisans fairly for their work rather than squeezing costs through mass production, prices reflect genuine craftsmanship, appealing to shoppers who prioritize ethical sourcing and are willing to pay accordingly for goods with real cultural and human stories behind them, rather than anonymous factory production.

Extended weekend hours, open until eight on Friday and Saturday and seven on Sunday, accommodate the steady weekend foot traffic that characterizes the Uptown San Marco corridor, an area that has increasingly become a destination for shoppers looking for something beyond the historic downtown’s more tourist saturated offerings. For visitors and locals interested in ethically sourced, globally inspired gifts, and for anyone drawn to the specific art of tatting lace jewelry, Crafts Without Borders offers a genuinely distinctive independent retail experience built on decades of family history in the fair trade business and the owner’s own personal artistic practice, a combination that gives real depth and authenticity to a category of retail, imported gift goods, that can otherwise feel generic and interchangeable from shop to shop.

Customers who take the time to ask questions at the counter often come away with a genuine story behind whatever they purchase, whether that means learning where a particular scarf pattern originated or watching Redding demonstrate the tatting technique behind one of her own jewelry pieces, an interactive dimension that turns a simple gift purchase into a small education in global craft traditions.