Christmas in Point Roberts

Which begins with the arts and craft fair at the Community Center over this weekend.  This year, it was restricted not only to hand-made goods, but also to those made in Point Roberts.  Which might have resulted in a smaller number of tables, but if so it was not noticeable.  There was a steady crowd all day as people looked and purchased and ate.  It was especially great (as ever) to watch the younger kids come in, all wide-eyed at the normally rather mundane Community Center turned into a glitter festival. 

The Point Roberts Quilters had a table this year, which we don’t always.  It’s a kind of on and off thing with us.  It often seems as if we mainly sell things to one another, but then we ought to be, in a way, our best customers.  We, particularly, understand the goods we have on sale, the nature of their quality and their use.  And often we have seen things before the craft sale and had some time to think about wanting to have them for our own. 

Rose was the stalwart behind our presentation this year, and she is probably the very best among us with respect to understanding display and selling.  I’m the worst.  But I’ve learned to live with this strange skillessness.  When I sell something to someone, in the very act of their paying me the agreed upon price, I am thinking about asking for less.  This is some kind of reverse negotiating skill, I’m afraid.  Anyway, Rose does it well and I sat about at the sale today watching her manage the constant flow of people, some looking, and some buying, and all touching.  Our table was highly touchable, I noticed.

Getting all these things ready for the craft sale was also a strange experience.  Normally, I work pretty steadily on a particular kind of thing.  It may not be just one thing, but it’s only one kind of thing.  It might be bed quilts, or lap quilts, or wall quilts, or postcards.  But the past six weeks, I’ve been bouncing around from framed quilts to embellished containers to postcards of quilts to dolls to creature pins, etc.  Leaves one with a very fractured feeling and gives me new respect for artisans who do this kind of work more than for a few weeks every three or four years.

Anyway, if you’re in Point Roberts, or nearby, the Christmas Craft Fair continues tomorrow.  Go and enjoy and buy if you have a mind to do so.  You’ll see lots of people you know and it is a very friendly and Christmas-y atmosphere, with live music.  Even though it’s commercial, it doesn’t feel particularly commercial because there’s no hard sell going on.  And there’s a lot of very lovely looking desserts and other edibles to keep your energies up.

And, if you’re not in Point Roberts, check out the arts and craft fair near you; there's bound to be at least one.  Your friends and neighbors have stuff to show you that you may not know about.  It's likely to be worth a trip out of the house on a weekend, whether you buy anything or not.  Think of it as going to a kind of pre-museum show: after all, all those things that end up in a museum started in somebody's studio or workshop and then moved on to some other venue, some other house or shop, usually, before they ended up entombed in a museum.

Very Crafty

Today was the Christmas Craft Fair, brought to us here on the Point by a group of extraordinarily hard-working volunteers. I went over this morning early while the people were setting up in order to drop off some donations (quilt stuff) for the raffle, and it was not clear whether these tireless organizers were seeking sainthood or martyrdom (or perhaps were just garden-variety masochists), given the difficulties of getting lots of people organized once a year for a complex but short event in a confined space. The Point Roberts’ Food Bank, which is the financial beneficiary of their work, surely thanks them in any case.

Seeing an event like this when it is empty of attendees and just about half put together by the participants is an interesting kind of sight. For me, it is actually possible to see it at this point, because when every thing is in place and the rooms in the Community Center are filled with sellers, buyers, and great quantities of goods, I am so overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, and movements that I retire to the corners and close my eyes. But this morning, it was just about right: all sparkles and not too much sound or motion. The sparkles, of course, are because it is a Christmas event. For Easter, e.g., you wouldn’t get near so many sparkly things. Maybe that’s because Christmas and the Solstice are sister events. Easter, more related to the equinox, is a less sparkly kind of event.

I went back in the afternoon, when the sights, sounds, and motions were at a pretty maximal level, and did not manage to stay long, though I did manage to buy some sweet treats from three pre-teens who had a table full of home-baked goods. There were beautiful jewels, garden ornaments, knit and crocheted goods, plants, scented bottles, soaps, and candles, Christmas goods and ornaments, lovely objects d’arts—and especially the painted gourds--and more than a few food tables that weren’t going to make a big contribution to that ‘heart healthy diet’ so much not-discussed at this time of year. I also bought a little bag of scrumptious candied orange-peel made by a woman who lives down the block and around the corner. In addition, you could buy a fine-smelling lunch to keep up your energy during the event. The parking lot of the Community Center was full, fuller than I’ve ever seen it, and I ran into lots of people I know. All-in-all, it appeared a very successful event. It’s the first of the Christmas craft fairs I’ve been to this year, and the first is, of course, always the best.

There were something like 32 different tables, most of which were personned by people from Point Roberts. We do a lot of things here by hand; there is a lot of interest in art; and we are a community concerned about being a community. It is doubtless that which leads to our complex blend of communitarian impulses and libertarian orientation. We reach out to one another, we pull back into ourselves. Today we had on display the best fruits of both tendencies.

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!

What Are You Growing?

I think the first farmers’ market I ever went to was in Los Angeles, about 60+ years ago when, in a post-WWII extravaganza, my parents—accompanied by 4 children—drove to southern California to visit relatives. One of the places we definitely went was the Farmers’ Market (at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly) in West Hollywood. I had never seen fruits of such size or of such abundance. Although I very much doubt we actually bought anything, it was plenty wonderful just to look at it all. In those days, you got lots of fruits and vegetables in the summer, but of a fairly narrowly-defined variety. The Farmers’ Market had things I’d never seen: artichokes, giant dates, limes, strange varieties of berries. It had more different kinds of cheese than I could have imagined existed in the world, let alone in a single market. It was amazing.

Fifteen years later, on a summer visit to Pennsylvania, I went to an Amish Farmers’ Market near York, PA, as I recall. They had eggs in a bowl—eggs that came without shells, twenty different kinds of lettuce, strange sausages, molasses pie (called ‘shoe fly pie’). Farmers’ markets in Massachusetts, many years later, were mostly about the many different varieties of local apples I’d never heard of and certainly never eaten: the macoun remains my best memory of an apple, although it might or might not be as good as the fruit on my own jonagold tree. Two weeks ago, in Sebastopol, CA, every crossroad seemed to have a little farmers’ market/fruit stand with all the wonders of central California edibles on display.

So, today, I wandered over to the Sunshine Coast’s Farmers’ Market in Sechelt to see what we had growing here. The weather has been so cool, I didn’t expect there to be much of anything at all, really, and I was not much surprised. There was one stand with four cartons of tomatoes (grown in a greenhouse somewhere locally, I imagine, as the nighttime temperatures are barely warm enough to permit fertilization of a tomato blossom, let alone growing and ripening of a fruit; another with garlic ‘scapes’ (the long green leaves of the underground garlic bulb which are sauteed and garlicy of taste) and ‘sea asparagus’ (this salty delicacy will be found wherever sea kayakers lurk. Carpeting the water’s edge on mud flats, sheltered coves and estuaries, sea asparagus … say no more, I think); yet another had some lettuce and other salad greens. No blueberries (yet), no strawberries (yet), no raspberries (yet)…not much of anything edible, really, and very little promise of too much more in the days to come.

But there were many, many booths, because, for the most part, the Farmers’ Market is a craft sale. There were lots of stands with jewelry, with hand-knit scarves and hats and kids’ sweaters, with garden rocks, with pottery, with more jewelry, with wind toys, and with driftwood decorations. Tables with carved soapstone, with potted plants, with yet more jewelry, soap, locally ground soft wheat flour (!), paintings, drawings, and finally tables with a palmist and a quick-sketch character artist and a busker playing the accordion.

This is what happens when you try to do a Farmers’ Market in an area where there are no farms and where, instead, artists and craftspersons are very thick on the ground. But perhaps we could just think of ourselves up here on the Sunshine Coast as people who farm art and craft, and it appears that we have raised a bumper crop of both.