(rolling string music continues) - Craft Alliance started in 1964 as an artist guild, and has been around for, at this point, 60 years, and has really grown into an important arts education facility here in St. Louis.

Our mission is to nurture and inspire creativity.

- [Instructor] Try to put some force behind- - We have five studios, which allow people to practice all kinds of materials and techniques.

We have the printmaking studio, where we also do paper making and book binding.

We have our metals studio, which allows people to, for example, make jewelry and do casting.

We have the woodworking studio, where we have lathe turning, and carving, and laminating.

We have the textile studio, which includes looms that people can weave on, but also do embroidery and dyeing, and all kinds of techniques that have to do with fiber.

We have our glass studio, which allows for smaller scale glass making, including flame working, and kiln forming, and doing things like stained glass.

And we have the ceramics studio, which is probably our most popular studio, and really includes everything from hand building to throwing pottery on the wheel, to glazing, so that people can really try an enormous range of different crafts.

- Craft is one of those art forms where it's all about communication.

It's communication from instructors to students, it's students communicating with materials as they learn how to throw a vase, or weave a tapestry, or make a metal locket.

And so we're not only empowering people and inspiring people to follow their creative pathways in life.

But ultimately, hopefully making people better communicators both in their day-to-day lives, for students to be able to express themselves, whether they are 15 or 84, to express themselves in the studios and hopefully outside of the studios.

- And now those will all be shiny and pretty underneath when it's fired.

(metal clanging) - The summer camps here are really exciting.

The students get to spend a half day in one of our studios for the entire week.

And you know, the younger kids start off at age seven, they're in the textile fiber studio, the clay studios, printmaking and paper arts, exploring different craft media probably the first time.

What's really exciting is when kids get to the age of 10, they unlock different studios for summer camps, so they're able to expand on those craft forms that involve fire and saws.

And that's something that's really exciting to kids.

It's something unique to St. Louis as far as offerings.

And not only is it fun of course, you know, it's exciting to play with fire in the glass studio, but it's also building confidence with the kids as well, it's building eye-hand coordination, muscle memory.

So for me, like the Craft Alliance summer camps are such a crucial part to learning not just an art form, but just learning how to become a responsible kid.

- For me, Craft Alliance is really important because of the way it encourages creativity.

One of the exciting things about the crafts field is that it touches on many different areas of our life.

So from design, thinking about functional things, to art, thinking about things that are meant to express ideas or give messages, there's so many ways in which craft intersects with so many parts of our life that it's just an amazing opportunity for expression.

I also think craft in particular, has the ability to connect people.

I think about things like quilting circles, parents and children or grandchildren working together on family traditions.

So craft has a really special quality of bringing people together that I feel is important to have in a world that can sometimes seem really disconnected.