Feature: Barcelona's Handmade Festival helps decorate apartment

The Handmade Festival Fair, which came to an end on Sunday, was a suitable place for those looking for ideas to decorate their apartments with hand-made items.

Sonia, from the company Tottetris, explained to Xinhua how to decorate a house with little square pieces made from wood.

"You can change the squares and combine the colours as you like," she said. "You can move the squares and change the position or you can have a fixed model and then add some squares thanks to a magnet system."

These squares are painted with natural dyes made from plants, Sonia said, adding that they also make squares with pictures on them.

Sonia works in this company with her partner and this was the first time they were at the fair since the foundation of the company in July, 2014.

"This is our first experience at a fair, so we will see how it goes afterwards, if people order some work or not."

This system of decoration that works like a puzzle or a tetris gives the customer freedom to chose colours and form. The little squares can become a picture on a wall, a headboard of a bed or can cover spaces such as the surface of a refrigerator.

"We have decorated the walls of a restaurant and the boss placed the menus on the wall combining the squares," Sonia explained.

Another idea to decorate a house came from Ecovela, an ecological candle.

"This is a system that allows you to make a candle with tap water, sunflower oil and absorbent paper," Jean Vincent explained. "You can do it with all the things that you have at home and in the end is the ancient system used for oil lamps. We have modernized it so that the system can be reutilize indefinitely," he explained, while adding that that's why it is 'ecovela', as it is economical and ecological.

Jean Vincent emphasized that people of all different ages like ecovela.

"The old woman who remembers her grandmother making it with a piece of cork years ago and also young people who have less money and like candles, they buy this once and have it forever."

Ecovela needs a glass that should be filled with water. It can be decorated with flowers, colours or others.

The Handmade Festival, the most important of its kind in Spain, showcased a large variety of "do it yourself" (DIY) products related to thread and fabrics, gardening, decoration or cuisine.

The fair was organized by Fira de Montjuic and the company Evident Events that gathered 235 exhibitors from local and international companies, 44 percent more than a year earlier. Endit