Hospital Craft Fair

Taisie Design's spoke-nipple bracelets

Yesterday I had the good fortune to help Leslie display her Taisie Design products at the St. Al’s Employee Holiday Craft Fair & Bazaar.

Twenty-eight employees from one of Boise’s largest employers showed and sold a weird variety of things. Something for everyone and every taste category. Home-made soaps, wreaths made of pages ripped from Plato, some gorgeous photographs of Idaho wilderness, crocheted caps, snow globes (reminding me of a legendary endoscopy department – Leslie’s home turf at the hospital – story about retrieving one of those cheerful holiday knickknacks from someone’s nether region).

Taisie Design's table

Display spots were first-come-first-served, and we got one of the last ones, situated next to a couple hawking ceramic tiles with mostly Mormon religious images and words. They weren’t as busy as many of the other vendors.

To me, a hospital is a bizarre place to have a bazaar. I’ve been in libraries that were ten times noisier than St. Al’s. The large room, lit by scores of very cold fluorescent lights, was nearly silent despite all the vendors and a fair amount of shoppers. I overheard several people remark that it seemed strange not to hear holiday music in the background.

Some of Taisie Design's items

Call me biased, but Leslie had the nicest display in the room. Earrings, necklaces, bracelets, tiny mosaic rings, mosaic mirrors and picture frames, and fly-fishing lanyards — hundreds of hand-made, intricate, carefully designed and fabricated items, each with a remarkable uniqueness yet cohering with the Celtic-inspired aesthetic she has adopted for her creations.

Taisie Design earrings

Leslie’s a perfectionist, and it shows in her stuff, from the items themselves to how they’re displayed: the earrings each carefully inserted into tiny holes she punches into a folded business card, with beautiful handwritten descriptions of each pair on the inside or back of the card, then hung on copper wires whose ends are coiled into her signature spiral, filling a chalkboard background inside an old window frame…

So I’m proud of my wife. Is that so wrong?

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