Holiday cheer comes to CBTech
Jennie Haydon of Seattle adjusts one of the Christmas tchotchkes she had for sale at the annual Holiday Bazaar at the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center on Saturday. “I do this for a hobby,” Haydon said, “I just find things in stores and fix them up and sell them.”
Charles H. Featherstone
Keri Perez of Moses Lake sits at the annual Holiday Bazaar at the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center on Saturday with a stack of denim quilts she made. Perez said during the lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, she just hunkered down and sewed. “I made a lot of quilts,” she said.
Christie Stensland of the Coulee City Art Club sits at the annual Holiday Bazaar at the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center on Saturday with paintings the club has altered with stickers of Sasquatch. “It’s fun,” she said, and something the club does with older, unsold paintings to help raise money.
MOSES LAKE — It got as low as 9 degrees Fahrenheit at the Grant County International Airport early Saturday morning, according to data from the National Weather Service.
Which means that winter is well and truly here, even if it doesn’t officially arrive for another month.
That also means the first of the area’s indoor seasonal markets have arrived too, with the P.E.O. Sisterhood’s Holiday Bazaar at the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center kicking off cold-weather shopping refuge and a chance for anyone with something to sell — caramel popcorn, beeswax candles, leather bags and purses, assorted Christmas tchotchkes, abandoned art altered to include Bigfoot — the chance to get out of the cold and find some customers.
“This is one of our big fundraisers for the year,” said Brittany Courtright, a P.E.O. Sisterhood member and one of the organizers of this year’s bazaar. “We collect our vendors and they come in and we give them a place to sell their goods.”
The Des Moines, Iowa-based P.E.O. — Philanthropic Educational Organization — was founded in 1869 to help provide scholarship and support to young women across the world, according to the organization’s web page.
Courtright said all of the proceeds from the bazaar, which includes a bake sale and a soup lunch, will go for local scholarships to high school students and women studying at Big Bend Community College. The organization also has an emergency fund, Courtright added.
“We are a women’s Christian sorority,” she added. “All of this goes directly back into scholarships.”
As Christie Stensland sat at a table representing the Coulee City Art Club, she pointed out black blotches on several of the paintings on display. They have all been leftover from previous art shows, Stensland explained, and have been repurposed for something … a little more interesting.
“We put Sasquatch on them and they are for sale,” she said.”It’s super fun and funny and you can move the stickers around on the paintings too.”
Holly Hiatt sat knitting next to a table full of wallets, handbags and purses. An Ephrata resident, she’s been selling Thirty-One Gifts at holiday markets like this for the last five years.
“We do home organization, purses, thermal lunch bags, grocery bags. I’ve got a little bit of everything from an umbrella to large utility totes, which are a best seller,” she said. “Plus I have a bit of a shopping problem. So then I come to vendor events and try to sell off what I couldn’t resist buying.”
Hiatt, however, is not planning on selling what she’s knitting — a baby blanket she intends to donate to a local hospital.
“Everybody needs a comfy blanket,” she said.
The Moses Lake Farmers Market has also scheduled three indoor markets in the Grant County Fairgrounds Commercial Building on the following Saturdays: Dec. 3, 2022; Feb. 11, 2023; and April 1, 2023.
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com
