The Vineyard artisans are moving from their regular summer location at the Grange Hall to their traditional Labor Day weekend home at the Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury.
The 16th Annual Thanksgiving Day artisans festival takes place on Nov. 23 and 24, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day at the Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury.
The festival is the largest holiday art show by Islanders, featuring hand-made sweaters, hand-made soaps, leather crafts, wood butcher block cutting boards, jewelry, art, the list is endless. The common denominator is that everything is hand-made by Island artists.
They are welded, varnished and stitched together, reinforcing their defenses and trying to prepare for the surge of shoppers who will soon be overrunning their precious stalls.
Island artists are readying for the 10th annual Memorial Day Artisans Festival to be held at the Grange Hall May 24 and 25 from 10 to 4 p.m.
Andrea Rogers of Oak Bluffs launched the festival and continues to act as its supervisor and manager.
All weekend, shoppers milled where fairgoers had the weekend before, this time slipping freely inside the Agricultural Hall grounds to admire everything from photographs to pottery, hand-spun scarves to hand-carved walking sticks, at the annual Labor Day Vineyard Artisans Festival. The artists behind this wide variety experienced varied success selling, too, in what most agreed was a tough economic environment for specialty wares.
The Vineyard Artisans Festival opens for the season, Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Grange Hall in “downtown” West Tisbury will fill to bursting with handmade clothing, jewelry, botanicals, decor and more, as artists and craftsmen of all breeds put their wares up for sale after a long winter of working and waiting for this very moment. And remember, most everything available is one-of-a-kind, so don’t dawdle, lest you lose out to earlier birds than yourself.
