This year, the Regional Centre for Handicrafts, through the Institute for Employment and Vocational Training, is promoting the National Handicrafts Prize, entitled “Toys”, with the aim of honouring craft workers who are practising or beginning their activities by focussing on creative and innovative work and thus helping to provide greater publicity for craft work.

The National Handicrafts Prize - “Toys” aims to provide recreational and pedagogical continuity for the concept of toys and the memory of those creators from the past who, from one generation to the next, designed and personalised their own variations on the popular imagination, thus contributing to the creativity of present generations whose perspectives on scale, movement, signs and colour are interlinked with references to the past.

To this end, the CRAA is responsible for selecting a maximum of 8 (eight) items for the Tradition Handicrafts Prize and the same number for the Modern Handicrafts Prize.

All items should be sent to:

Regional Centre for Handicrafts

Rua de S. João, nº 47

9504-533 Ponta Delgada

for selection by a Regional Jury and display in a location to be announced.

Interested parties should request their registration forms to this Regional Centre or to the Secretariat Island Delegations.

Applications and items submitted must reach this Regional Centre by 31 March 2007 and the application form must be accompanied by a photograph of the item and a photocopy of the candidate's Craft Worker's Licence or copy of a document providing proof of this requirement.

At regional level, competitors may submit one item for each category - Traditional and Modern.

Each of the winning items chosen by the Regional Jury will win a cash prize of EUR 250 and a certificate for the category in which they were entered.

Craft workers may submit items made from various different types of materials, such as clay, linen, paper, cork, wood, metal, glass, recycled raw materials or salvaged waste materials, tinplate and plastic.

Competitors are fully responsible for transport insurance and the packaging of items sent to, and returned from, this Regional Centre. The Institute for Employment and Vocational Training will be responsible for insuring items selected by this Regional Centre to be sent to, and returned from, the National Competition exhibition.

For further information, contact the Island Delegations of the Regional Secretariat for the Economy or this Regional Centre