Off-Registry Dinosaur Goodies

As mentioned on Friday, I headed to a craft fair this weekend with the wife - the Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago, which was sort of a hipster mecca. I also had intended to get to the Field Museum, but my Cairn Terrier, Gregory, decided to get a case of the barf n' squirts, and it seemed inadvisable to leave him at the parents' house. So I'll have to get back there as soon as I can, and I will document it properly. The Field has been my "home museum" since I was little. It's still a great feeling to walk into the main hall.

The craft fair was packed to the gills and the sun was big, yellow, and relentless, so we didn't hang out too long there. There were a few dinosaurian crafts, intermingled among the ever-popular "cute monsters," ninjas, robots, and woodland creatures, but nothing that blew my top. I decided to take a look at etsy and find see what kind of dinosaurian goodness there was to see. After scanning fifty pages of results for the search term "dinosaur," these two items stood out:

The first is this nifty T. Rex print by Berkeley Illustrations. They do a lot of portrait-style drawings of animals in dapper clothing, and put the most famous dinosaur in a nudie suit.


This Etsy seller creates "make yourself" pop-up card and model kits, including a dinosaur series. Here's the Triceratops greeting card.


Nothing else dinosaur-related really grabbed me by the cajones, though there is certainly a lot of it. One exhibitor at the fair whose work I'm familiar with was Jay Ryan, the Chicago-based poster maker. He had a diptych of two Elasmosaurs (which are marine reptiles) done in his usual style. He was swarmed with people when I stopped by his booth, so I didn't get to speak with him. Unfortunately, the diptych is not displayed on his website, but his poster for the recent Pitchfork Music Festival features a generic sauropod. So that'll do.

Oh, before I go, the title refers to a term I learned from some soon-to-be-bride or another at the fair. Apparently, buying a gift that the blissful couple hasn't specifically registered for is called "going off-registry." As in, "oh yeah, I'd totally go off-registry for that." Just so you know.