Well-Crafted Work

This is the weekend of Sechelt's Hackett Park Craft Fair, sponsored by the Sunshine Coast Arts Council. We have been going to the Fair for as long as we have been here and have watched it grow and change, ever better in its presentation. There have been very few years when the weekend had rain or drizzle but as far as I can remember it has never been cancelled for bad weather and today was full-blue-sky. It is held in a park in Sechelt, is juried, and features maybe 60-70 different booths of many wonders. It has no food to speak of, unlike some craft fairs and any county or state fair in historical memory. In this way, it keeps its focus on the art of craft, which seems appropriate for something sponsored by an arts council as opposed to a good times council.

I did a quick Google on the history of craft fairs and came up with very little. Few of the individual craft fairs list their dates of origin, but those that do seem to come from the mid-70’s. I certainly remember no craft fair in Idaho in the early 50’s, or in upstate New York in the late 50’s, or in California in the early 60’s. I do know from personal experience that, as an aspect of the great hippy movement of the late 60’s and early 70’s involving dropping out, there was a sudden and new interest in craft of various sorts including beading, jewelry making, stained glass, decorative pieces generally, and hand-made clothing. I would guess that the first, albeit small, craft fair I ever saw was in the late 60’s in Los Angeles and involved those kinds of goods. In some ways, the 60’s craft fair seems to have been an outgrowth of head shops, those odd little places that sold marijuana paraphernalia.

Whatever their origins (and I imagine there was a history before the 60’s, but that it was an interrupted one), they are big deals nowadays. My visiting children had last week attended a big craft fair in Sebastopol, California, and now were here for the big craft fair in Sechelt, B.C. They were in a position to tell me that the crafts here in B.C. were superior in quality to the crafts there in CA, but that the food in CA was definitely vastly superior to that of the B.C. event. So, there is one piece of data, I guess.

Because the Sunshine Coast is increasingly about tourists, we have more than one craft fair each year but no more than one craft fair each week. Last week was Sechelt’s 5th Annual Arts and Craft event, not to be confused with this week’s even longer ago annual event. There are several more during the summer, and there are many of them in the fall and around Christmas. No shortage of crafts here. And, apparently, no shortage of customers for crafts or, I’d guess, they’d stop holding the fairs.

I wish (and this is a frequent wish about all kinds of phenomena) that I’d taken notes all along about the kinds of things that are sold at the Hackett Park Craft Fair so I could systematically trace the changes over time. I do know that there used to be several hat sellers and this year there were none; that there used to be a lot more sellers of clothing more generally than was the case this year; that potters are regulars but that each year they seem to be a different group of potters; and that jewelry sellers are always numerous. I think there were fewer wood workers in this year’s fair than has previously been the case, and I know that there were many more sellers of items that are intended as decorative features for gardens than ever before. So I would guess that we have now moved on from adorning ourselves (except for jewelry) to adorning our gardens.

This year’s Best of Show award (at least from my family) goes to Douglas Walker, who is from Black Creek, B.C. He is a former photographer who, in his 50’s, ended that career and went on to become a maker of metal/water sculptures. His metal sculptures are fountains, but they are made largely of recycled metal pieces, such as trombones or flutes, e.g. In some pieces, the pump actually moves a visible wheel that somehow then causes all the water to flow beautifully. These pieces are large (2 or 3 feet high at a minimum) and exquisite. They start at around $400, as I recall, and the largest one he had on display was $2,200. His web site shows many more of the fountains than he had in his booth and they are well worth seeing. Walker has been doing this work for only a few years and, he said, has been very successful so far. He manages to be one of the lucky few crafters whose work is not only endlessly interesting to the crafter him/herself, but is also so remarkable that the fair attenders are willing to pay substantial amounts for the pleasure of having his work in their own life.

The essence of a successful craft fair lies in its ability to show you something not only well-made, interesting and beautiful, but also surprising. Mr. Walker’s fountains certainly filled that bill for me. A very good day!