Moscow Renaissance Fair ~~ First weekend of May ~~ East City Park, Moscow, Idaho

Palouse Journal #18, Spring '85, p. 23, 25
Phil Druker
Photos courtesy of Moscow Renaissance Fair Committee
Article reprinted by permission of Phil Druker
Corrigendum: The Mt. St. Helens eruption occurred on the last day of the fair in 1980.

Moscow Renaissance Fair -- "What does it take to get ready for the Fair? Find out from a few artisans."

"Producing and selling crafts is the full-time occupation and the sole source of income for seventy percent of the artists attending fairs like the Moscow Renaissance Fair."
-- Steven and Cindy Long
Some arrive in muddy old trucks, or in painted, rebuilt school buses and in beat up Volkswagen vans, while others arrive in polished pickups or in new compact station wagons. Some have beards and long hair, while others are clean cut. Some travel alone; others arrive with friends; most bring their whole families. They arrive bringing stained glass, drawings, duck decoys, leather goods, self-published books, gold and silver jewelry, handmade kitchen knives, iron work sculptures, kites, candles, scrimshaw belt buckles, weavings, pottery, wooden toys, handmade clothing, and photographic landscapes of the Palouse. These people are the artisans exhibiting at the annual Moscow Renaissance Fair.

The Moscow Renaissance Fair ... is the earliest important crafts fair of the spring in the Northwest ... "It is a good reunion time for the craftspeople. ... The fair has a good reputation among craftspeople because it is a friendly fair, and ... the community is enthusiastic and supports it."
-- Albert Chaney, jeweler from Missoula
Each May for the last twelve years, craftspeople from all over the Northwest have been bringing their products to sell at Moscow's spring fair located in East City Park. While some people might consider this assortment of characters a frivolous throwback to the late Sixties, the approximately one hundred exhibitors attending the fair, eighty percent of whom are from outside the immediate area, are actually serious artisans and business people.

Like other people in business for themselves, artisans bringing their wares to the fair have a strong sense of independence. They enjoy the sense of accomplishment they experience from producing and selling a product. Like other small business operators, these craftspeople find working for themselves requires more discipline and harder, longer work hours than working for someone else or working for a large corporation. Cindy and Steve Long, who have a shop in the Sandpoint area where they produce traditional folk toys and who sometimes give seminars on how to make a living working as an artisan, estimate, "Producing and selling crafts is the full-time occupation and the sole source of income for seventy percent of the artists attending fairs like the Moscow Renaissance Fair." The Longs work five days each week producing toys. Cindy adds, "Making a living with crafts is not like winning the lottery. You have to produce to make a living. Our cash flow depends on the amount of work we produce. We can't afford to put things off until the last minute.["]

Many of the artisans who are coming to the fair spend their winters producing their products. Some might take a vacation during January, after their Christmas sales, and others might produce special items for their friends or take on special orders. However, by February these artisans are hard at work, working five or six days per week and often more than eight hours each day to build their inventories for the spring and summer fairs where they sell their wares.

To produce their wares, many of the craftspeople have built their own shops, their own kilns, and some have even built their own machinery. They cannot use makeshift tools and make-do shops to produce the product the public appreciates and buys. Many artisans have made a considerable investment in time and money in necessary equipment. Jerry and Martha Swanson from Ovando, Montana have built, with the help of a machinist in Missoula, their own replicas of sanding machines needed to produce wooden toys such as tractors, trucks, cars, and boats. The sanders they built would have been too expensive to buy, but they needed the machines because, as Jerry explains, "Eighty percent of our work involves sanding. Hand-producing enough of the many identical parts we need would be incredibly tedious, and without the machines we never could produce enough. We had to go the technology route to keep our mom and pop operation going."

Like other people operating a small business, these artisans find it difficult to hire labor. Finding people willing to work for the wages artisans can afford is difficult, and hiring is expensive because of the high cost of worker's compensation insurance. A few of the artisans attending the Moscow Renaissance Fair contract out some work to friends and neighbors. Usually, however, these artisans work in partnership with their families to produce the wares they sell.

One of the benefits artisans gain from running their mom and pop operations is that they can work with their family. As Jerry Swanson said, "It's great to be able to rub butts with your wife while you're working." But he admits this kind of close contact might not be for everyone, and, "We have to be careful not to make our workshop a prison of its own."

The Moscow Renaissance Fair, which is the earliest important crafts fair of the spring in the Northwest, provides welcome relief from the raging cabin fever which the artisans begin to feel after working all winter in their shops, and it signals the beginning of the selling season in the artisan's yearly cycle. Other fairs follow in Ellensburg, Wenatchee, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, California, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. Most of the artisans spend part of the summer traveling to these fairs. "The gypsy life is great," adds Jerry Swanson. "You can work at your own speed and as your needs demand, and then you can travel to earn your money."

Moscow's fair provides the artisans with a way to get ready for the other fairs that follow. The artisans have to repair and refurbish their booths and the equipment that they use for selling. Those who put on skits to sell their wares practice and develop new routines.

Since the Moscow Renaissance Fair is the first fair in the area, "It is a good reunion time for the craftspeople," says Albert Chaney, a jeweler from Missoula. "The fair has a good reputation among craftspeople because it is a friendly fair, and even though it is not a big fair, the community is enthusiastic and supports it despite the terrible weather we've sometimes had." During last year's fair, there was a snow storm. "If that had happened in Missoula, no one would have shown up," commented Katherine Fichtler, a potter from Missoula. The artists not only have endured bad weather; some have also endured the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, which occurred on the last day of the fair in 1981.

Many artisans bring specific items to the fair that they know will sell in Moscow. Often, they look at what they previously sold in Moscow and make sure they have plenty of those items on hand. Jerry and Martha Swanson make sure they have plenty of toy tractors and carts to sell. Katherine Fichtler, who won't be able to attend this year's fair because of her six-week-old baby, usually tries to have a good selection of planters for spring, and she tries to prepare pots that incorporate themes that people who live on the Palouse will appreciate. Other craftspeople make sure to finish wares that will attract Mother's Day gift buyers. They also try to bring items that students can buy to take home as gifts for their friends and relatives, and the artisans consider what people on the Palouse might want to buy for approaching June weddings.

To be successful as producers of crafts, these artisans have to do more than produce their wares. They have to be careful businessmen who can judge their markets and sell their wares. Coming to the Moscow Renaissance Fair gives them a chance to learn what people like, what people expect to find in the products they buy, and learn what matters to the consumers of crafts.

But most importantly, the Moscow Renaissance Fair is payday for the artisans, and the artisans are paid not only in money but in the appreciation the fair-goers show for the finely crafted products the artisans have produced.

The results of their winter labors will be spread out in the spring sunshine in East City Park the first weekend in May.


The Moscow Renaissance Fair is a community celebration of spring held each year on the first weekend of May. The fair is directed by a private, non-profit community group and is the only self-sustaining festival of its kind in the region.
Moscow Renaissance Fair | P.O. Box 8848 | Moscow, ID 83843 USA
http://www.moscowrenfair.org


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