Autumn in my childhood during the late 1990s and early 2000s was marked by craft fairs. Each year, my mother and I would attend three: a massive craft fair in Chester, N.J., a smaller one at my elementary school and then a third at a Catholic school in the next town over.
The go-to item for me was a hair wrap, where a crafter would spin string around a small lock of my hair and tie it off with beads (remember, this was the age of platform shoes, body glitter and the Spice Girls). Naturally, I would grow tired of the hair wrap after a few weeks as my hair started to grow and I’d speed along the process by cutting it out.
But in addition to fleeting trends, these craft fairs were where I learned a deeper appreciation for objects made by hand.
Using an allowance my parents had budgeted for me, I began to collect handcrafted items including hand-painted animal figures carved from wood, sewn outfits for dolls and hand-made knot bracelets that I would try to replicate myself. Often, I would help my mother pick out Christmas gifts for relatives and friends. We’d always stop at vendors selling baked goods for a cause and supported many Girl Scout troops, including my own.
When my co-worker Eleanor Kohlsaat and I started to pull together the Valley Calendar’s annual holiday market list, I couldn’t believe the number of craft fairs that take place throughout the Upper Valley. Can a region the size of ours really support so many small-scale producers? Or are we oversaturated with too much of a good thing?
But then I thought a little bit more about the region we live in. This is a place, after all, where many residents make it a habit to stop at their favorite farmers markets every week and people make it a priority to know who their neighbors are. Of course, people would extend that need for connection to the crafters and producers in the Upper Valley.
Now that I am older and my parents begin to downsize, I am getting more questions about what I want to keep and what they can get rid of.
Recently, they gave me a bag of magnets that I knew I could not reasonably keep. The generic Disney princess squares went into the donation pile. The handmade, goofy-looking snowman emblazoned with my name in gold script now resides on my refrigerator.
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
