Craft-a-Fair 2014

The Salmon Festival is over and we are preparing for our first Christmas Show of the year.  It is the Craft-a-Fair at the Interior Savings Centre in Kamloops this Sunday, November 2nd.  It is put on by the Royal Inland Hospital Auxiliary with this year celebrating their 30th Anniversary.

We will be in the same spot as we have been for several years now which is on the concourse --  turn left at the main entrance.  We are down a little ways on on the left hand side.

Our main feature again this year is our interchangeable earring system with plenty of new styles of art beads to wear along with our most popular selling item, our scarf jewelry.  This year we will also be featuring our latest interchangeable scarf necklace designs which were first introduced at the Lake Country Art Walk last September.

Chunky Inside Out "Natasha" Bead Necklace

We have had the opportunity to demo our clay quite a few times over the past few months.  We generally like to show how we make our canes with the lady bug being the most popular.  The other technique we like to demonstrate is how we make the "Natasha" beads.  I often refer to them as "inside out" beads as that is basically what they are.  A clay log of mixed colors is cut and literally flipped inside out to reveal a four sided mirror image pattern.

This is a new style necklace I made using these type of beads simply strung and knotted on some satin ribbon.

Taking in the Salmon Run

We had some family visit us last week so had took some time out to take in the salmon run.  The fall weather this year has been really pleasant and was great walking all the newly groomed trails in the Roderick Haig-Brown Park along the Adam's River where all the Sockeye Salmon are spawning.

Walking trails along the Adam's River

Look-out point over the river to view the salmon spawning

One of the information boards along the walking trails

I couldn't get a good photo of the salmon spawning this year so this is a picture I took from four years ago.  Dave's daughter took a really great video of the spawning salmon which I uploaded to our facebook page.

All that fresh air and exercise made us hungry and there are plenty of food vendors set up at the grounds serving anything from fresh bannock and salmon burgers to pizza and mini donuts.

Food Vendors

This month is going by so quickly, it is hard to believe the salmon festival is nearly over with the final day on Sunday, the 26th.  Winter is just around the corner and time to think about our first Christmas show of the year which is only a week later.

Demo at the Salmon Festival

We had a full day last week at the Salmon Festival helping out at the Artisan Market and doing a demo.  We met a lot of tourists from various parts of Canada visiting along with some from the U.S. and as far away as Australia.

Artisan Market tent with demo out front

Table with clay items for demo

Dave and I later discovered this photo prop and were goofing off a bit.  That was Dave's Yogi the Bear pose (I think?).  lol

Sockeye Salmon Magnets at the Salmon Festival

We made our first visit out to the Salmon Festival since it started to replenish some stock that sold.  The artisan market is even more impressive this year with a wide range of salmon themed artwork from other local artists.  The market is in a tent this year which provides plenty of room for the large amount of tourists passing through.

This is Connie who is heading up the market and has done a terrific job so far with everything being so well organized.

We made more sockeye salmon magnets again this year in both the sculpted technique as well as our "stylized" ones.

These were created from texture sheets we made from clay using my original drawing.  They are  flexible so we can run them through our pasta machine to make a deep impression.  Mica powders are then applied to give the shimmering color.

If magnets are baked in the clay they can lose their strength so they need to be glued in after baking.  To increase the strength of the magnet as well as maintaining a strong hold so it won't come out, we embedded a metal washer (A) in the back.  Another layer of clay was placed over top with a large enough space to glue the magnet in after the pieces are baked.  In this case we found that an apoxy clay worked really well.

New Items Now at Intwined Fibre Arts

We are finally almost caught up with our fall orders for the yarn and quilt shops.  Some new items we added this year were our stitch markers and covered crochet hook handles.

Intwined Fibre Arts is one of the stores in our area to have these items for sale along with a nice selection of our buttons and other novelty gift items for the knitter.  They have been busy creating some new and fun projects.  I love this family of owls made from sock yarn and how they used our "Color Wheel" buttons for the eyes!  Aren't they adorable?!

We love seeing how our work is used in unique and different ways like this.

Salmon Everywhere

The Salmon festival started yesterday and our display rack at the artisan market is all filled and ready for the more than 200,000 expected tourists to come through over the next 3 weeks.  We will be out several times to view the spawning salmon in the river as well as replenish the supply of our handcrafted ones.

As part of the artisan market gift shop, we are to take our turn to help out and demo our work.  We will be taking our first shift this coming Friday (Oct 10th) and are looking forward to it.

To get into the spirit of things, we are seeing salmon themed shop windows like in the Intwined Fibre Arts store in Salmon Arm who have some of our salmon zipper charms for sale.

Chum 'N Luba's Unique Boutique here in Chase is selling our salmon jewelry which go really well with some of the new fall designer dresses they have in stock.

This dress happens to have a front zipper and the salmon zipper charm looks like it was made just for it!

These are a couple more of their dresses with a salmon necklace that go really well!  I absolutely love this dress and could see myself wearing this!  I love the hat too and is handmade from Nelson BC.

The red dress here was in the shop window so was difficult to capture a good picture.