Meet your makers

Tulsa’s DIY movement finds its activist roots

Cars, trucks, and a Mr. Nice Guys food truck lined the streets of Owen Park, leading to a stone church on a hill. Along the sidewalk I passed a band of colorful mohawks and studded leather. The days of pews, sermons, and Sunday’s best there had long passed.

Downstairs, where churchgoers once listened to tales of Abraham and his clan, I found a girl selling handmade pillows with a big “You Suck” screen-printed on the front. The supply of records and comic books struggled to keep up with demand. Money was changing hands, and the alt-makers at Tulsa’s first-ever Punk Rock Flea Market – this wasn’t your grandma’s crochet, nor was it the bohemian-chic that dresses the windows of Anthropologie – were moving some serious inventory. In jeans and a tank top, I was the outsider. My embroidered tea towels and Okie-quipped T-shirts would have been vehemently disregarded by this crowd of apparent darker taste.

Punk is a genre in the larger maker movement. Tulsa maker visionaries Thom and Christine Crowe developed their two MADE shops, one in downtown Tulsa at Fifth St. and Boston Ave. and the other in the Pearl District at Sixth St. and Peoria Ave., and made it known that both are dedicated to all things hand-crafted. Before MADE, the Crowes helped to introduce

Tulsans to makers and vice versa at Indie Emporium, an annual event in our city since in 2007. With originality and a twist (and sometimes a joke) on the mass-produced, the cool of crafting has burgeoned in our city, now filled with places where local makers are welcome and invited to peddle their wares.

Recently at the Brookside store Ida Red I came across locally made edibles, clothing, soap, greeting cards, art – makers, it seems, know no bounds. A store associate pointed out some wooden bow ties by Two Guys Bow Ties. “Even the Thunder wear them,” she said. She proudly shared one of the “two guys” built Ida Red’s tables and custom shelving. “He is very talented,” she added.

Recently, a nasty uppercut from the City of Tulsa struck the local makers’ haven Creative Room at Sixth St. and Peoria Ave. with $27,000 of force. In the March 19 issue of The Tulsa Voice, Mitch Gilliam interviewed owner Amanda Chea about her space, which shares an entrance with the Pearl District’s MADE store. It was also the original location for the Punk Rock Flea Market and the Pearl District Maker’s Markets, where Creative Room’s affordability at twenty bucks a table yielded higher profitability for participants. 

Organizers scrambled to situate temporary venues, but now that they have their bearings, makers are rearing fists. Eric Dean heads the Pearl Market and is throwing a fundraiser that will take the form of a typical maker market but will be executed auction style, with proceeds going to the mandatory renovation of Creative Room. The event is slated for April 13, 6 p.m., at

The Fur Shop, 520 E. 3rd St. Dean is calling the event, “Damn the Man, Save Creative Room.”

One blouse I found at Punk Rock Flea Market, a typical Forever 21 purchase, had been amended now it said “MENACE” across the front. With black lips and a long, white bone holding up her green hair, the maker told me she will graduate with a journalism degree from the University of Oklahoma this May; she hopes to find a job writing in Oklahoma City, she said. Her business card, offered up alongside a buffalo-tooth necklace, read “DIY or DYE.”