Crafts, cars and cotton candy: Festival and car show return to Draper Park
May 02, 2019 01:32PM ● By Katherine Weinstein
The Draper Arts & Crafts Festival will be held on Saturday, May 11 in Draper Park. (Photo courtesy David Wilks/Draper City Parks and Recreation)
By Katherine Weinstein | [email protected]
It's that time of year again! Draper Park will soon be filled with an array of unique craft items and works of art, classic cars, live entertainment and food. Draper City's seventh annual Arts & Crafts Festival and the Susan K. Classic Car Show will be held on Saturday, May 11 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Over 70 local artists will feature their works for sale at this free event. Items will include fine art, pottery, jewelry, soaps, clothing, home decor and much more.
Artists come together for Arts & Crafts Festival
"In a ‘big box’ world, the Arts & Crafts Festival gives people the opportunity to find something special and unique for Mother's Day," said Frank Falk, who exhibits and sells his cell phone amplifiers, iHorns, at the festival.
"My art involves creating passive amplifiers for the iPhone or any cell phone that has a speaker at the bottom," explained Falk. "I take a variety of conical-shaped items, mostly vintage and antique items, and utilize them to amplify sound."
Falk uses everything from antique horns that once allowed people to listen to music from phonographs and radios to simple cow horns. His iHorns can fill whole rooms with music played from a cell phone and can also be used to amplify a voice for speaker phone.
With their unique look and functionality, Falk's iHorns have won Best of Show awards at the Utah Arts Festival and the Urban Arts Festival. Falk and his wife enjoy traveling to arts and crafts shows around the country and look forward to this year’s festival in Draper.
Draper potter Steve Bryant and his wife Donna have been selling their one-of-a-kind wares at the Draper Arts & Crafts Festival since it began. Bryant, who holds a degree in ceramics, has been making pottery since 2000. “You can’t keep everything you make, so I started selling it,” he said. The name of his business is Two Dogs Pottery.
Bryant makes functional kitchen pottery such as bowls, colanders, trivets and mugs with an artistic quality. Some of his trivets are made to look like waffles, others evoke Celtic designs. His most popular items are rice bowls and coffee mugs. All of the glazes Bryant uses are food safe.
More recently he has been experimenting with a Raku kiln involving a traditional type of firing invented in 16th-century Japan. Organic materials and metals such as copper and iron are used to add color to the pottery instead of commercially prepared glazes. The pots come out of the kiln glowing red-hot and have a distinctive smoky look when they are finished. Bryant offers classes in pottery making at his Draper studio two nights a week.
Bryant sells his wares at the Wheeler Farm Farmers Market in the summertime. He enjoys the Draper Arts & Crafts Festival. “I’m a lifelong resident of Draper,” he said. “It’s always nice to go back to the park that I’ve known since childhood.”
By contrast, artist Natalie Allsup-Edwards will be setting up her Hand Drawn Photo Booth at the Draper Arts & Crafts Festival for the first time this year. “I’m excited to see what it’s like,” she said.
Allsup-Edwards’ Hand Drawn Photo Booth is a riff on classic photo booths in which an artist sketches portraits in miniature of a seated customer — or two — by hand. The customer comes away with four small portraits drawn in pen on a strip of paper.
“You have to commit to your line and draw it quickly,” said Allsup-Edwards of the challenge to capture faces and personalities quickly and accurately. She uses specialty drawing pens that make very fine lines.
Allsup-Edwards started out making the drawings herself but now hires other artists to draw as well. She began the Hand Drawn Photo Booth in 2011 while a student at the University of Utah. Her experimental project has become an entertainment company hired for festivals, weddings and other special events.
Making sketch portraits is something Allsup-Edwards greatly enjoys. “I love personal interaction, seeing people laugh — it’s really satisfying,” she said. “When you see someone really excited, that’s what I like!”
The Susan K. Classic Car Show
For the fourth year in a row, the Susan K. Classic Car Show will be held in conjunction with the Draper Arts & Crafts Festival on the grounds of Draper Park. “What we do is get together individuals who collect cars and invite other enthusiasts to bring their cars to the show,” explained organizer Jon Madsen. “We do the show in honor of my late wife.”
Susan K. Madsen, whose grandfather collected cars, tragically lost her life in a car accident with a drunk driver five years ago. Jon Madsen wanted to find a way to honor her memory. “You realize that you can’t change it, you have to figure out what to do,” he said. “I started by doing the things that we had wanted to do together.”
Madsen collects donations of $15 from each participant in the classic car show. The funds are given to Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD.) His goal is to have over 25 cars on display in this year’s show.
DT Auto, a local classic car restoration company co-owned by a friend of Madsen’s, will display a couple of their cars in the show. Madsen will display his own red and white 1956 Oldsmobile 88 as well as his brother’s 1968 Chevrolet Camaro. All models are welcome, but the focus of the Susan K. Classic Car Show is on classics and older automobiles that are rarely seen. A highlight of last year’s show was a blue and white Volkswagen van, a model which was manufactured from 1950 to 1967.
Both the Susan K. Classic Car Show and the Draper Arts & Crafts Festival are free and open to the public. Draper City Park is located at 12500 South 1300 East in Draper. For more information, visit the Draper City website.
