Crafty For Christmas

Saturday was the HAND.CRAFT.IT. holiday sale in Madison. The venue - the MADISON-MORGAN CULTURAL CENTER - was an old school building and gymnasium, transformed into a museum-slash-performance space and an event hall. The venue and grounds were beautiful and it was perfect weather for a craft sale. In the sculpture garden I spotted this yellow faceted sculpture that kinda reminded me of PAC MAN:









Billy from HANDCRAFTED INDUSTRIES spotted me in the parking lot after we had both moved our cars...he asked me to take pictures of his booth because he had forgotten his camera:







Business at first was slow. I'd say that most of the crowd averaged 40 to 50 years in age and that this explained the slower sales. I don't think they were accustomed to this sort of indie craft fair. The crowd was very "Laura Bennett" - you Project Runway fans know what I mean. Anyways, we wanted "Jeffrey" and what we got was "Laura"...where were all the punk rockers, indie kids, street-savvy urbanites, and art fags we were used to seeing at these craft fairs? As the day progressed, business picked up and in the end, we actually made a good amount of money. Maybe not as much as we're used to making in Atlanta or Athens, but definitely enough to justify doing it again if we get a chance...













The food table was conveniently located near our booth, and they served up tasty grilled cheese sandwiches, chili, and miniature cupcakes all day long. The DJ was also conveniently located near our booth. Unfortunately, one of the speakers was pointed directly at us - earlier in the day, the music was so loud that it probably helped to drive customers away from our booth. Eventually, he turned down the music to a bearable level. The music might've drove me crazy, but he was a really good DJ, the same one that deejayed at the I.C.E. Atlanta show. He gets major props from me because he played Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Fishbone, a rare Visage instrumental, cuts from the "Nightmare Before Christmas" soundtrack, "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambataa and Soulsonic Force, Yellow Magic Orchestra doing a killer version of Archie Bell and the Drell's "Tighten Up" which I had never heard before...HOTT! The funny thing is, the DJ shared the stage with the children's activity tables....one of the tables featured a "make your own jumprope" station, and as kids finished making their jumpropes, they would immediately test them out on stage, causing the records to skip every now and then!









Even Missy found time to visit the jumprope station: