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Two-Day Palm Harbor Arts & Crafts Festival draws crowds

The holiday season  really brings out the local arts & crafts shows, and this year has been no exception.  If you scroll back you’ll see that we visited a small arts show up in Tarpon Springs a week or two ago.

But the mother of all local arts shows is the Palm Harbor Arts & Crafts Festival, a show that has been a fixcture in Palm Harbor for the past 35 years.  Most of these shows have been held in the Olde Palm Harbior area right off Alt. 19, and that’s where the show was held again this year after a hiatus of several years during which the show was moved up to the St. petersburg College Tarpon Springs campus.

A couple of art-loving Newfoundlands

This year was fun as always, athough it seemed to me that both the crowds and the number of vendors were down a bit from the average. that should be no big surprise, I guess, what with the slow economy and the general lack of disposable income rattling around in peoples’ pockets.  Several of the vendors told us that business was way down this year, and some mentioned that the past two or three years have been something less than great.

Bad weather on Saturday, rain and cold, really put a damper on things on the first day of the two-day show, although things seemed to have picked up a bit on Sunday.

One nice thing this year is that Sunday was Pet Day, a special featured done in cconjunction with the Humane Society of Pinellas. There was a pet parade on Sunday afternoon, and a special Santa was on hand so that proud pet owners could get their pets’ poctures taken with

Dogs love Santa, too...

Santa. There were also adoptable pets on hand, along with a whole street of pet-related vendors selling everything from pet food to leashes, collars and other pet accessories.

Aside from all the official pet stuff, one nice feature was that there quite a few pets simply being walked around by their owners. Not everyone loves animals, but we do, so we really enjoyed the different pets that were on hand.

We also ran into John Mascoll, a very talented wood worker who lives in Safety Harbor. John won the best of Showe award last year, and because of that we didn’t think it was likely that he would place thisyear, but he did — a big blue ribbon was hanging in his display.

The Palm Harbor arts how is a juried show, which is nice because ot attracts vendors who might not otherwise come. Even if an artist doesn’t sell a whole lot, he or she might win a prized worth bragging about.

This was the 35the annual Palm Harbor show. It started out pretty small, but it has become a major Palm Harbor event that local people really wait for.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 8:34 am and is filed under Palm Harbor, real estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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