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July 31, 2007

Craft show promises quality goods

Stephen Tait

NEWBURYPORT — Kathleen Bailey said her first visit to the Yankee Homecoming craft show last year was a disappointment — and one she hopes to remedy this year.

Bailey moved to the city a year and a half ago from Michigan. She said the items at the craft show weren’t “really that great,” not up to the level she and others expected from such an event in Newburyport.

After volunteering some at Yankee Homecoming last year, Bailey was asked by last year’s chairman, John Alston, to be the chairwoman of the craft show this year.

It is an opportunity Bailey is using to improve the craft show by bringing in more quality vendors.

“I said I could do it and I got some feedback from previous years’ participants, shoppers and committee members,” she said. “It’s really gone downhill in the quality and it was more like a flea market, is what people were saying.”

Bailey said the quality at today’s event will be top notch. The event, officially called Market Square Day, goes until 6 p.m. with vendors set up along State, Pleasant and Inn streets.

To help ensure quality exhibits, Bailey made the craft show a juried event, meaning a committee of seven people looked through applications that vendors had to submit to enter the show. From those applications, the committee picked the vendors who will participate.

The applications included pictures of the products, photos of the booths and other information.

“It brings the quality up and it maintains a variety,” she said of the juried show.

The event will feature 70 vendors, offering such wares as original photography, jewelry, stained glass and many dozens of other products. Word of the show attracted so many vendors that they had to turn some people away, Bailey said.

“We kind of went out there looking for different people and word got out,” she said.

Bailey said the committee used the applications to consider the quality and uniqueness of the art work. She said deciding who gets to sell goods allows the committee also to maintain diversity of products, a particular point of emphasis since last year’s show was chockablock with jewelry makers.

The committee also went to other craft shows to recruit some of its favorite vendors.

“We tried to anticipate what Newburyport shoppers and people coming in for the week want to see,” she said. “I think they are looking for something different when they come here.”

Vendors at the craft show must sell handcrafted and hand-designed items, and art work, such as photography, must be taken by the people who are the vendors.

“We didn’t want anything that was mass-produced or brought in from other countries,” Bailey said. “We wanted hand-crafted things from people in the area. It is just a nice group, actually.”



Annual craft show

Where: Downtown Newburyport

When: Today, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

What’s new: Juried craft show with handcrafted items, a major change from previous years’ souvenir tents.

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