1985 Things I Learned Shopping Today - 1

Sunday, August 31, 2008

I went to the New Paltz craft fair today. There are annually two major craft fairs, the biggest is in Rhinebeck (moneyed area) in the spring, and New Paltz (college town), quite a bit smaller, is in the fall. In neither case are we talking home-made pre-holiday trinkets.

Rhinebeck has some spectacular stuff, but New Paltz is better juried. At Rhinebeck I have seen things that I know to be manufactured and imported - things I've bought from China or Tibet through eBay. I don't know how they were allowed to slip in. In New Paltz you are more likely to see the craftsman in the back of the booth actually making items. Everything in new Paltz is hand made ---hand carved, printed, painted, spun, woven, embroidered, blown, wrought, glued, dried, beaded, strung, built, quilted, recorded, sewn, designed, soldered, whatever.

I usually buy too much that I don't need, because it's all so beautiful.

Today I learned that if you wear a hat with a brim that hides your eyes, you can look at things without making eye contact with the sellers, and wow, you buy less. All I bought today was lunch, and some biscotti.

Open letter to craft fair organizers: All the other stuff is pretty well mixed. Wood, fabric, metal, glass, jewelry - all nicely mixed and scattered throughout four or five medium-sized tents and multiple aisles of stand-alone booths. So why oh why do you put all the scented stuff (spices, candles, oils, craft foods, sauces, dips, perfumes, soaps, all the odiferous crafts) all together in one huge tent? By the fourth stall (of the sixty-four in the tent) I couldn't smell or taste anything anymore. It all ran together. By the sixty-fourth, I had a pounding headache. I can't imagine what it must be like for the people who have to spend all day there.

Open letter to ALL fair organizers: Thank you for providing free parking, and for the kids to direct us to open spaces. But why oh why do they direct people who arrive at, say, 3 pm to the far end of the south forty? By mid afternoon, the folks who arrived early have left. The closer parts of the lot are nearly empty. Why not let us look for spaces there, instead of making us walk for a half hour past empty space after empty space, even entirely empty sections, to the gate? The only explanation I can come up with is an attempt to prevent cross-traffic, but since it's all one-way anyway, I don't see where that matters.

Oh well. I enjoyed the day, even if the french fry guy didn't have malt vinegar, at least he had gravy.
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