Looking back at the Magnolia Blossom Festival: Arts and crafts show attracts variety of work

Although the Magnolia Blossom Festival's Saturday night festivities focus on a delicious steak, the festival days allow arts and crafts vendors to showcase their wares in hopes of making a sale.

The 2023 Magnolia Blossom Festival was no different and featured an array of vendors from all parts of the Ark-La-Tex.

Stephanie Hills, owner of Cadeaux-Unique, LLC, an online business opening as an actual store in North Bossier this July, said she did well at the Magnolia Blossom Festival with her goods. Cadeaux, which is French for gift, helps describe her offerings which include vintage tier stands.

"People use them for charcuterie, and put meat and cheese on them, but a lot of people are having tea parties and using them," Hills, who has been doing this kind art and craft work since 2015 in Austin and moved back to Northern Louisiana in 2021. "This is the first time I’ve been to the Magnolia Blossom Festival, and it's gone very well. One lady bought four of them. She sent a picture of the one she got to her daughters and then she had to come back and get three more because they all wanted one."

Hills finds the dishes at thrift stores, estate sales and Goodwill, so the problem is not having enough materials to work with, she said.

"Some people will even give me some, but my house is overrun with them and I’m looking forward to having storage in the new store," she said.

Hills also had on display of homemade goat milk soaps which are made through a process called melt and pour. She starts off with a 25-pound block of bare soap and cuts into smaller pieces and adds mica for the colors and lets them set. She continues the process which involves microwaving and letting them make into a solid and then in a few hours these are cut into four-ounce soaps that have various scents.

Pat Crommett and Linda Auck of Bennet Cove Crafters of Lake Greeson, brought with them a collection of terrariums, wooden charcuterie boards and other wooden crafts to the festival.

Crommett, a master gardener, said she looks for the glass homes for the terrariums at junks stores and garage stores and repurposes them -- a nice round bowl with a lid will work, as well as a pitcher with a covering. She's even used a fondue set to plant several open-air plants that didn't need a cover. Along with the plants she puts in the terrariums, she adds little glass figurines like tiny dogs or pigs to make the set more appealing to buyers.

She said it does not take much time to create a terrarium.

"Usually to create one, it takes an hour or so, and to have it properly rooted it can take a month or so, but they will last years and years," she said. "They need to live close to a window or they can have artificial light. The oldest one I have is 16 years old, and the oldest one I have seen is 65 years old," Crommett said. "When the plants start getting too big, you just clip them off."

Auck, who is the other part of Bennet Cove Crafters, said it takes about seven or eight coats of polyurethane for her wooden boards, wall wine glass holders, and wooden stands which can be used for anything from TV trays to a place to display a cake. She said it takes about a week or so for these boards to get ready. She can adhere the hardware that will hold the wine glasses for some of her most popular items which include a wooden board background.

Bo Jameson, a native of Magnolia, said he didn't have to go far for the festival but said he had more success with his wares at the Festival on the Rails in McNeil. Since his retirement from Magnolia Post Office, Jameson has been working on chair weaving and repair. Some of the chairs under his tent were lawn chairs and were weaved together with black and white string, others had colorful reds and yellows. Others were wooden chairs, looking lost from their mates at a dining room set. Learning how to weave and repair chairs is something he said he taught himself how to do after reading an article about it and then he followed up with buying a DVD.

Jameson said he can't really say how long the chairs take him to repair because he does not time the work. He just works on them what he calls "all the time," but then starts and finishes when he wants because when he's tired, he can take a break and come back to it.

"I don't know if I can answer why I do this, I don't know it is just kind of soothing to me," he said.

While Jameson was discussing his hobby, Tina Buehring of Shreveport came by to ask him if he would be able to repair a stool of hers that had been damaged. Buehring said work like what Jameson does is so important and she's afraid it is not being taught like it used to be.

"I think it's a lost talent and a lot of people don't do it anymore and if it isn't taught to young people, I don't know where people will get it from," she said.

Although this is a fair point in this social media crazed world, Jameson isn't worried about his granddaughter, Lindsey Cornwell, 19, a sophomore majoring in art at Southern Arkansas University, not learning about art and creations. She stopped by his booth Saturday of the Magnolia Blossom Festival just to say goodbye as she was leaving and showed him the painting, she had entered the art show which had won a ribbon. She wants to be an art teacher someday.

"I’ve learned a lot from him, and I designed a mural in McNeil as a high school student," Cornwell said.

And arts and crafts in young people was still alive and well in Aaliya Broomfield's booth called Aaliyah's Crafts. Broomfield, 18, is out of high school and is at SAU majoring in studio art. She said her booth featuring pillows, bracelets and canvases was the first time she had been at the festival. People who want her products may contact her on Facebook.

"I like art and I really like the graphic design part of art and as far as my education, I’m thinking about going for my degree and becoming an art teacher," she said.

Kayla Pickett of Kayla Pickett Fine Art of Magnolia has been painting for a decade and has been honing her craft more as a business for the past three years. Her booth contained assorted sizes of colorful paintings of florals, including splendid magnolias, accented with pastels and golds. The paintings she brought to the festival included some originals, four of which she had sold by Saturday afternoon, and many prints which were very popular as they were smaller and had a smaller price point.

Pickett said the amount of time it takes her to do a painting has everything to do with its size.

"I can maybe do an 8 by 10 in an hour and a half, but pet features take two to three hours," she said. "Lots of people want their pets painted. And I do bridal bouquets, and arrangements and landscape florals. I just love pretty flowers and pretty colors. I’d like to do more bridal bouquets and I’m starting to do more live wedding paintings."

Bella Flor of West Monroe, owned by Liliel Fraley is in the United States but collaborates directly with artisans in Chiapas, Mexico to bring their customers handmade jewelry, leather purses with embroidered florals on them, traditional Mexican shirts for women with the scoop neck and Mexican embroidered flowers and hats including these flowers as well.

"It's not like we have bulk in the store, they come in and pick out the colors and through the process of video calls back and forth, we create the pattern and cut it into a size," Fraley said. "It's like putting pieces of a puzzle together. All this is traditional Mexico, so we wanted to bring a piece of our culture here. Our culture is first generation."

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