(The Point Roberts Craft Faire this past weekend proved a great success. Lots of vendors at tables with a considerable array of lovely and useful goods all handmade in Point Roberts. (That was one of the rules: you could sell only things you had made yourself, and you had to be a U.S. citizen or hold a Green Card in order to sell.) It is pretty amazing to see how much handmaking goes on in a place with such a small population. There were elegant chocolates made with exotic flavors (my favorite was strawberry jam and balsamic vinegar: just incredible, really); lotions, creams, soaps; jewelry with semi-precious stones, with metallic rings, with beads of all sorts, with polished stones, with anything you could reasonably put in jewelry; knit goods for the winter cold; pieced baby-blankets; flowers; cards, photos, notepaper; ornaments of many shapes and colors; quilts and quilted things; yarn and fleece sheep and llama (just one llama, as all the llamas made of llama hair that were available were of, for, and from Lily the Llama). And more of those things. Lots more. And hot cider throughout the day, and soup and chili and tea and coffee.
The hall was decorated with the goods, but also festooned with garlands and trees and lights and general glitter and bling and as far as I could tell, a good time was had by all. The number of people who came through the space on Saturday was astonishing, and not least because Canadians who had come down from above us were telling tales of 90 minutes in line at the border. Later, I was told that it was not just overwhelming numbers but a computer problem, but there were really a lot of people. And they bought generously, perhaps stunned from having been in a border lineup for 90 minutes.
Then Sunday dawned very wet and very grey with the impediment of a flooded Gulf Road which proved something of a challenge for shoppers trying to get to the Community Center. But, by noon it had drained off a good bit, rushing down the full roadside ditches to the ocean, and the shoppers re-appeared.
It was all over by 5 p.m. They drew tickets for all the raffles and the immediately locatable winners collected their winnings and the rest of us packed our (small number of) remaining goods and went home to take a hot bath or a short nap or something: overwhelmed we were by it all. Which is why we do this only once a year.
My thanks to everyone who showed up and participated. See you there next year.
This is my quilting and spinning friend Heidi (Lily the Llama's Mom) and me at our shared table.)
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