International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe

My friend Mary and I met up on Saturday night in Santa Fe, to get a bit of an early start on getting to the Market. (See Mary's take on our motel room here.) We were also spending some time going through a bonanza of beads my friend Steve sent me from the Pacific NW. I wanted to share some of the bounty with Mary (and will share more of it with my bead retreat group this fall), and we also picked out a fairly large bag of beads to donate to OffCenter Community Arts Project in Albuquerque. That done,after a good night's rest for me (Mary said the running toilet woke her up and she couldn't get back to sleep-I'm still in the sleep anytime/anywhere mode of the long time night worker) we made our way up Museum Hill in Santa Fe and were promptly turned back to go down the hill to the park and shuttle area. When we made it back by shuttle to Museum hill, we saw why. All available parking lots had been turned into an enormous bazaar of artists, craftspeople and their wares. Many of the artists had set up little areas where they showed how they made their beautiful goods. It was sensory overload from the first step, extremely well attended (translate that to WAY CROWDED!). We probably didn't see more than a third of all the vendors before we'd had enough of the crowds and made our ways home. I stupidly forgot my camera in my car, but Mary took tons of pictures of many of the artists, and I'm betting she'll be posting them to her blog. We saw a metal worker from Haiti making cunning metal decorative hangings, weavers and basketmakers from different countries, textile artists of all sorts, carvers, potters, leather workers. You name it, they had it. A gamelon group played, there were Balinese dancers, an Andean flautist. We brunched on gyros and dolmas. I bought a clever little Day of the Dead guitarrista from Peru for myself and an Blessed Virgin retablo for a friend. All in all a wonderful little mini vacation.