On another message board, I mentioned in a general conversation thread that I’d be selling crafts at a craft fair. A board member from Jamaica thought I might mean “aircrafts” or “watercrafts.” He didn’t seem familiar with the meaning of the word “craft” to mean a handmade decorative object. Is this meaning of the word “craft” uncommon in Jamaican English? What about in the English spoken in other parts of the world?
(Or is it possible that English simply isn’t this person’s first language?)
I do not think “craft” is a small handmade object.
Craft: Skill in doing or making something, as in the arts; proficiency
I’m a native speaker of Hiberno-English, and I’ve lived in Ireland and Australia and have spent a good deal of time in Britain. I can safely say that I have never come across “craft” in the sense of a hand-crafted object until I read this thread. When I check the OED I see that it did at one time have the sense of “a work or product of art”, but the last citation is from 1582 and the sense is noted as “obsolete”.
It has obviously survived (or been revived) in US English - part of the same trend, possibly, that saw “collectible” become a noun in US English some time in the mid-twentieth century.
“Selling crafts at a craft fair”
That’s totally normal usage in the UK, the “crafts” bit being “stuff I have made”.
This is a totally normal usage in the US as well.
Rather than techniques? Gawd, might be wrong here. 
I see this usage all the time. Crafts as in “arts & crafts” or “handicrafts.”
Heh. I guess it’s context related. Someone might “sell their craft” in the sense of selling their skill or trade, but if a person told me that they planned to sell their crafts at a show, I’d assume they meant they planned to sell stuff they’d made at an event organised for that purpose.
Edit: I speak UK English with some American influence.
Well, maybe, but if you said “a craft” singular, I would assume you meant an aircraft or boat. “Arts and crafts” is an idiomatic phrase, but I don’t think that sanctions an individual object, a product of someone’s craft (i.e., skill), being called a craft.
Even if it did, it is a silly thing to say, as it is so non-specific as to be quite uninformative. If you say “I am going to be selling my crafts,” you could be selling practically anything. It is like saying “I am going to be selling things.” Why not be more informative and actually say what sort of things they are?
I am a native British English speaker, with extensive experience of American English too, and speaking of an object that you have crafted as a craft seems distinctly odd to me.
“Crafts” in “arts and crafts” does not refer to individual material objects. “Arts” in that phrase refers to acquired skills; “crafts” to practical skills. Hence “arts and crafts” refers generally to decorative design and handiwork. Similarly, “handicraft” is not a thing which has been crafted by hand, but the process of crafting things by hand.
We might say craft market but yep I would say pretty common language in Australia.
From Merriam-Webster:
Bolding mine.
“Selling crafts” in the sense of small handmade objects is a perfectly common and well-understood meaning in the US.
[QUOTE=UDS]
“Crafts” in “arts and crafts” does not refer to individual material objects.
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It can, according to Merriam Webster:
I do not doubt that the word is sometimes used in that sense, even in Britain, and may well have sometimes been so used for a long time (long enough, even, to get into the dictionary), mainly because it is easy to see how someone familiar with idioms like “arts and crafts” of “craft fair” might infer from those that the objects on display or sale are called crafts. I do question, though, whether this usage is common or standard. To me it seems odd, and more like an understandable mistake than standard English. I say this not because I am some hidebound prescriptivist, but because if I heard it in conversation (especially if it were in the singular), I, like the Jamaican mentioned in the OP, would, at least momentarily, be confused by it, and I suspect most other British English speakers would be too.
Sure. But Merriam-Webster is evidence of usage in US English. The OP was asking about varieties of English other than US English.
The origin of the phrase “arts and crafts” is the Arts and Crafts movement/style which emerged in England in the late nineteenth century, under the inspiration of William Morris and others. The words therefore undoubtedly referred to the processes/skills/values employed in the creative process, not to the physical objects created, if only because much of what was created did not consist of physical objects but of designs - typefaces, patterns, etc. It’s only later, and I suggest largely or exclusively in US English, that the word “craft” came to be applied to an indivdual hand-crafted object.
I have often been to a craft fair, but it would never occur to me that the object I buy there is a craft, any more than the object that I buy at an agricultural fair is an agriculture.
I grant you, the object I buy at a horse fair is indeed a horse, and analogy has probably influenced the development of the language in the US.
But I refer to something you might make in Arts & Crafts as a craft and I use handicraft as a noun, as in, “Look at all these handicrafts!” And it’s a use I see all the time, as I said.
I agree - it feels similar to when I hear individual plastic construction bricks described as ‘a lego’. I understand this is normal usage in some places, but not here.
I would normally expect to hear someone say “I am selling craft items at a fair”
But you don’t say where you use and observe this. The OP asks whether this usage is confined to US English. In what variety of English do you use this, and observe this usage?
And on a supplementary (and not just for AClockworkMelon); if in your variety of English you would use “crafts” to refer to an indeterminate number of handcrafted objects, would you just a readily use “craft” to refer to a particular, or a single, handcrafted object? (“Look at this craft I bought this morning.”)
OP here. Wow, this thread has been enlightening. I didn’t realize there was quite an opposition to the term “craft” in some places, and that it’s not only considered odd, but downright incorrect, to refer to small handmade objects as “crafts” in some places.
Which makes me wonder what decorative handmade objects are called when they’re not called “crafts.”
I’m not sure that there’s much call for a word for objects whose only common characteristics are that they are (a) handmade, and (b) primarily decorative. The closest term that leaps to mind is “ornaments”, but while ornaments are decorative, they’re not necessarily handmade. Still, if you like aesthetically objects which are made by hand, and you have built up a collection of various kinds of them, you could talk about your ornaments.