Artisan Festival opens the holiday season

"It's been busy," said Flora-Lee Wagner, one of the organizers. "We thank Mother Nature, I think, a little bit for that, too," she added, noting that the cool autumn air seems to draw the crowds out in anticipation of the coming holidays.

A total of 34 artisans — 10 of them new this year — participated in the show. Wagner, whose booth in the past has featured colourful wooden toys, concentrated this year on hand-painted place mats and floor cloths. She also had fruit jellies.

With the holiday season just a few weeks away when the artisans' festival takes place, many homemakers take the opportunity to stock up on decorative items for Christmas. The rule of the festival is that all crafts must have been created locally by hand, without mass-production or kits.

Some artisans from outside Westmount are accepted when no one local can be found from a particular creative discipline. Items must be "crafts" rather than art, and photographic efforts have to be part of another type of creation, such as a card or a framed work.

Pete and Bonnie Claude, who came in from Harrington in the Laurentians to participate in the show, had an impressive display of rustic birdhouses they created from old wood gathered in fields and tin discarded from ancient barn rooftops.

Suana Verelst, an accomplished children's book illustrator who decided to branch out into dollmaking, had a choice location for her colourful offerings just inside the entrance of Victoria Hall's main auditorium. "They are toys for adults, or soft sculptures, or for older children," she said, describing the delicate creations. "They're not really to play with because they're too precious."

Ryoko Wada, an artisan of Japanese origin, stood at her table dressed in a traditional kimono. She had fashioned a number of different types of accessory from cloth, including handbags, hairbows, credit card holders and change purses. Truus Roest-Chapman, an NDG resident who has participated in the artisan festival for several years, was back again with her delicately wrought 'raku' ceramics. "I spoke to a few of the people here and they said it was packed this morning, and then it eases off, and then it gets crowded again towards the close," said Stanley Baker, who was out on Saturday examining the wares. "Tomorrow a lot of the people will come late in the afternoon, because they think then maybe they'll be reducing their prices before the sale is over. "It's all very artistically displayed, he added. "It's a great annual event — one of the high points of the year for Westmount."