Fun with Craft Fairs, Part 1

The long-awaited tale of "hey, where did my money go?"

My first craft fair in this little spree was in Grant Park. A friend of mine makes this fabulous soap (go check it out. Buy her soap!) and she was going to be selling it there. It was August in Georgia which means it was hotter than the SURFACE OF THE SUN, so being the nice person I am, I went to take her some popsicles. I didn't want to spend any money, so I tried to go in and not make any eye contact with cool crafty items. (I'm a sucker for anything handmade by some poor person just trying to make some money by doing something they love. It's so easy to justify, like with Lantern Moon. Oooo! I'm helping a Vietnamese woman send her child to school. I need this!) So I walk through the craft fair lugging my huge bag of popsicles and ice, searching the booths for my friend while simultaneiously trying to avoid seeing cute things that needed to come home with me. As you might imagine, this did not work very well. "Not looking, not looking, where is she, not looking, oh, that's cute, NOT LOOKING . . . " I found her, delivered the popsicles (she was profoundly grateful. I think she may have offered me her first-born.), and fled the premises, quickly, before the cute crafts could tempt me any further. Some sneaky items that had managed to catch my eye lingered in my brain, tormenting me, until . . .

The Next Day, when I decided to go back and buy those things I couldn't stop thinking about. (Shut up. I'm weak.) As I crossed the parking lot under a beautiful sunny sky, large fat drops of rain started falling. By the time I had actually entered the fair, the rain was pelting down, soaking everything. People were running to their cars and rushing to secure their booths. I figured, hey, I'm not sweet enough to melt, and now I've got the whole place to myself. So my little drowned-rat self wandered around the whole craft fair, and came away with two fun prizes.

1) A lovely handmade bag (big enough for lugging my knitting supplies. You know, I never used to carry a purse, and then cargo pants went out of style, so I carried small purses. I hated large bags. Until I started knitting. Now I never carry my little bags anymore because they can't hold my knitting.) Check out the girl who makes them here.

2) An amazingly cool spiderweb sculpture thingie. Check this guy out. I love this for so many reasons. 1) It's cool. 2) All the beads and stuff strung on the wire are pretty. I love sparkly things. 3) The little spider in the corner is neat. Probably not something that would ever happen in the natural world, but in sculpture, it's neat. 4) The big spider has the accurate number of little bead eyes. I'm a nature dork. I like things like that. 5) This will be perfect to put on my wall after I take all those squares down. I'm gonna need something. It's going to look naked up there.

Stay tuned for the next installment, which takes place at the Yellow Daisy Festival, one of the largest craft fairs in the country. (Is that foreboding music I hear?)