Barn bazaar

MOSES LAKE — Julie Piper Phipps said the Piper Barn Show was a family project, and that was one reason she wanted to revive it.

Her mother Sheila Piper, with some friends and relatives, started the Piper Barn Show, an annual show of holiday crafts and foods at the family farm out on Road S Northeast. Julie said she grew up with the show, working the soup-salad-pie-cake booth in high school. “This is what we did.”

She moved away and got married to a man with a career in the military, but that didn’t mean she gave up working the bazaar, she said. “I would come from wherever – it was barn show time.”

Her mom closed it down after more than a decade, but when Julie and her husband moved back to town she thought it was time to revive it, she said. The fourth annual revived Piper Barn Show was last weekend.

Vendors and customers filled the barn to overflowing Friday morning, so full that vendors spilled outside. There are some grain silos next to the barn, and one of them has been converted to exhibit space.

Margie Hart, of Richland, and members of her family were part of the Friday morning crowd, “five of us,” she said. “It was our pilgrimage. Our Christmas pilgrimage.” It was their first trip, “and we’ll do it again next year, that’s for sure.”

Vendors were selling handmade Christmas decorations, handcrafted snowmen made of everything from ceramic to felt, hand-carved wooden bowls, table linens and custom bags, jewelry, chocolate-covered dried cherries, and crunchy-munchy, a mix of cereal and nuts drizzled with caramel. “It’s our barn show special,” said creator Laree McNeese. “”We only sell it at the barn.” It’s been a feature at the barn since the first show back in 1988, McNeese said, and she was at every show until Sheila Piper stopped sponsoring it about 15 years later.

Sheila Piper said the barn would be a perfect place for a craft show, McNeese remembered. “And it was. And it is.”

“When we first started this thing we wondered if anybody would show up out here,” remembered Sheila Piper’s sister Sherrill Reid. Actually they did, and even after Sheila Piper closed it, people would ask if it was coming back, she said.

In its revived edition it’s still a family affair. Reid traveled up from Utah, while other family members came from Minnesota, California and Colorado, among other places, to help out. “Everybody comes,” Julie Phipps said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.