Being a nomadic accordion busker requires certain qualities. A love of travel, often alone. A sense for the best street corners. A ready smile.

It also helps to have a puppet.

Sophie Crafts, native of Leverett, resident of nowhere in particular, has played accordion on the streets of Reykjavik, San Francisco, Edinburgh, Provincetown, and others. She is in Northampton for the summer, playing songs ranging from Italian folk tunes to the Game of Thrones theme in front of Thornes Marketplace or Faces. But she will be back on the road before long - by herself, as she prefers.

"There are so many more possibilities when you're not influenced by anyone else," Crafts said. "You can be whoever you want when you're traveling."

Crafts learned the accordion as a student at Clark University, after seeing buskers in streets and subways while she studied abroad in Spain. Her parents bought her an accordion on eBay for her 21st birthday, and she started practicing - though the early going was a challenge.

"I had a broken arm at the time," Crafts said. "I balanced it on my knee, had to used my neck or chin."

Crafts had played piano as a child and picked the instrument up quickly. She played her first show after six months, performing songs at a school benefit concert for earthquake victims in Haiti.

A hobby turned into a way of life when Crafts spent the summer after her graduation busking in Provincetown.

"It started as a joke," she said. "I got really sick of people asking what I was going to do after I graduated, so I started saying I was going to find fame and fortune playing accordion."

Everyday People: Sophie Crafts 3 Gallery: Everyday People: Sophie Crafts

She then went to Northampton and San Francisco, where her act started to come together. The family friend she stayed with in California painted a memorial to Craft's cat, Ruby, on her accordion box, which she uses as a tip jar when she plays. During the summer of 2011, she sewed the piano-key dress she wears when she performs. And in 2012, busking street corners in Edinburgh during the city's Fringe arts festival, she built a freestanding marionette which sits in her accordion box, wearing matching clothes and mimicking her movements through a wire system as she plays.

Her music has taken her across Europe, through Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic, sleeping in hostels or couchsurfing. She once spent a day performing in Reykjavik before a flight home, without a Krona in her pocket; listeners offered her mittens, hot drinks and invited her into their homes.

"I played for the sunset which was approximately one p.m.," she said. "That was the best hat I ever got, as they say."

It's a lifestyle that suits her, Crafts said. She will get jobs for a few months, like the one she currently has at Sam's Pizza in Northampton, and then live off tips as she travels, a part of the streetscape for tourists and locals in the cities she visits.

"I prefer to play on the street because you can play whatever you want," Crafts said. "I feel I can play a lot more expressively when I don't have the nerves of having all eyes on me."

Crafts, who will be taking a break from busking this summer to lead a student travel group in Costa Rica, describes her act as "not your grandmother's accordion," and is as comfortable playing the Rolling Stones and Lady Gaga as French accordion classics.

And her best advice for aspiring street musicians, she said, is simple: look up and smile.

"Put on a show," Crafts said. "You're giving a gift to the community."