If you go What: Soulcrafting will be featured at the Firefly Handmade Market, a pop-up, local artisan market. See projects you can make and talk to experts about your ideas When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, April 26, and 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday, April 27 Where: Watershed School, 1661 Alpine Ave., Boulder Info: fireflyhandmade.com, getsoulcrafting.com Noteworthy: The market also will feature more than 80 other Colorado artisans (about a third are new, to keep the market fresh and relative), kids stations, food trucks and more

It’s like Etsy coming to life in your living room — only you get to have a hand in the creation, closely guided by an expert.

Want to build your own reclaimed-wood kitchen table? Make exquisite pastries with a pro? Hand-carve a surfboard? Build your own sailboat? Make a leather handbag?

No need to take a lengthy course, buy all of the equipment yourself or stumble through Youtube tutorials. If you have a dream to make something by hand, a new Boulder-based website, getsoulcrafting.com, offers to connect you with the right expert in your community to teach you how, and tailor the experience to meet your specific dreams.

It’s a hark back to the days of apprenticeship, where people learned hand’s on trades from a master — only with a modern spin.

Just a few months old and still unrolling participating experts every week, the company is currently not charging extra for its services; you pay only the artisan for his or her time, plus materials. So you can create your own works of art for a fraction of the showroom price. Get a $3,500 dining room table for $1,600, subsidized by your own sweat and splinters.

You also walk away with the knowledge, sentimental value and maybe even your own personal details on the piece.

Bryan Muir says he originally wanted to create a networking website, but when he moved to Boulder from New York last fall, Colorado’s DIY, creative energy transformed his vision. As he watched the community rebuild itself after the massive floods, he says, he realized the importance of not just having DIY skills but also of having in-person relationships — off the web.

“Boulder is such a hands-on, can-do, action-focused community that it got me thinking about applying the idea (of the networking website), rather than to ideas, to the products we buy or give as gifts, or the meals we put into our bodies,” Muir says. “All of those things, with very few exceptions, can become a Soulcrafting experience.”

This is not just a series of how-to videos, he says, and it’s more personalized and intimate than traditional open-studios events. Craftspeople open their shops and techniques to participants, often one-on-one for an entire afternoon or stretch of days.

One high-end homebuilder is offering a “complete homebuilding experience” for someone who wants to literally build his or her dream house from the ground up.

On a smaller scale, Boulder resident Nathan Grieb recently spent three hours with local artist Elke Bergeron, who specializes in repurposed leather accessories and bags. For $150, Bergeron provided the supplies and walked Grieb through creating a leather handbag for his girlfriend. He had never worked with leather before.

He dyed the strap red, to match her red hair (“I knew I needed to incorporate red somewhere,” he says), and he wrote a little note on the inside. He added a custom logo to one corner.

“She loves it,” Grieb says. “It’s a custom bag specifically for her, she can use it every day, and it has a story behind it.”

Plus, Grieb says he feels confident enough to make another leather bag by himself now, if he had the right materials and equipment.

“For a lot of these different crafts, you could spend a whole lot of time going on YouTube and investing in different machinery to do it, but having the opportunity to work directly with a professional with the right machinery is a huge advantage for time and money,” he says. “And you walk away learning something, and having a physical object you get to use forever.”

After Colorado, Muir says, he hopes to expand Soulcrafting to other states. Today, the website features about 25 craftspeople, with more in queue. Eventually, he says, he plans to add a surcharge for the services, a small percentage of the cost of the experience but not enough to push participants away from the website to set up sessions on their own.

Right now, he also offers the “concierge” services for free.

Betsy Redfern, of Boulder, contacted him a few weeks ago with a unique request. Her 10-year-old granddaughter was in town, and she enjoys cooking. Redfern asked Muir to set up a pastry-making class in her home — one that would be appropriate for four adults and two children, including a 4-year-old.

Chef Angie Spuzak, originally from Poland, brought the ingredients to Redfern’s house and guided her extended family through making a blueberry pie, apple pie with a lattice top and pumpkin muffins.

“Cooking as a family is enormous fun, and improving one’s technique is always a good idea, especially if you learn a slicker, better or healthier one,” Redfern says. “We were excited to have someone in our home we normally wouldn’t have gotten a chance to talk to, and the crowning part was I got to eat the best blueberry pie I’d ever eaten in my life.”</p> <p>The cost: about $14 per person per hour. In total, it cost $250, plus the cost of the ingredients.</p> <p>Redfern says she was surprised how quickly and easily the request came together. She plans to use Soulcrafting again for other projects.</p> <p>”I think it’s fun in that you can, on any given Wednesday, just imagine something you’d like to do, and in a couple of days, someone has put together a whole process to make it happen, that’s enjoyable and fun and you learn a lot,” she says.