CARIBOU, Maine — Over 130 vendors set up shop in Caribou High School over the weekend, offering a variety of homemade creations in the school’s gym and cafeteria.
Cars and trucks flooded the CHS parking lot, forcing some guests to park on the grass just half an hour after the event began on Saturday morning.
Traffic was crowded both in and out of the building last weekend, as people hurried inside the gym and cafeteria to view, and potentially buy, the products of local artisan labor.
While many vendors offered homemade clothing, Bernadette Thibeault’s “Mad Mittens” are made out of recycled coats, shirts, and sweaters.
Thibeault says she has been making recycled clothing for six years.
“I just fell into it accidentally,” Thibeault said. “I saw a pattern on an old sweater, tried making the mittens, and before I knew it I had 60 pairs and didn’t know what to do with them.”
Thibeault’s recycled clothing creation may have ended there if her daughter hadn’t suggested that she take the mittens to a craft fair.
“I’d never been to a craft fair before, so I didn’t know what to do,” Thibeault said. “But once I went, I never stopped going.”
Since 2010, Thibeault, a Frenchville resident, has sold her environmentally friendly clothing at a plethora of local craft fairs in Presque Isle, Fort Kent and Madawaska.
From start to finish, the mitten creation process can take up to three and a half hours. Thibeault first finds a coat, shirt, or sweater with the right pattern, washes and shrink dries the original clothing, and then creates lining for the finished product. According to her, a sweater can sometimes only yield one pair of mittens while others can be transformed into five.
“I thought this would be good for the environment,” said Thibeault, “so that’s what I’ve been doing since 2010. I love making them.”
Clothes and paintings weren’t the only items offered at the Arts & Crafts Fair. In the cafeteria, Dave Carter of New Limerick sold a plethora of pleasantly scented soaps made from scratch.
In Carter’s words, he is a “retired teacher turned soap maker.” Inspired by his grandmother, he started making soap five years ago.
“My grandmother was a sharecropper hillbilly down in Kentucky,” said Carter. “She had a third grade education and was the smartest woman I ever knew. She could kill a hog, render the lard, and create soap.”
One day, while listening to an Appalachian discuss soap making online, Carter was struck with memories of his grandmother’s stories about the soap kettle.
Carter’s soaps, sold under the name “Feet, Face and Fanny Soap,” are made with a base of olive, coconut, and palm oil. They also include shea butter and castor and jojoba oils with several unique scents and fragrance free options for those with eczema or psoriasis. “I heard her voice, so I thought I’d do it for grandma,” Carter said. “I made some soap for my friends at first. They loved it, and suggested I go into business. Now we have a good business with word of mouth advertising and a lot of new and returning customers.”
“I do it in my kitchen at home,” Carter said. “It keeps me out of trouble. If I were to time myself, it takes a couple hours. You have to let the soap rest for a 24-hour process called saponification, which creates glycerine.”
“Glycerine is that really silky stuff in soap, and commercial soap makers have learned to siphon it off,” Carter continued. “So you use their soap and it dries your skin, then you go out and buy a high end product that they put the glycerine back into. Ten percent of every bar of our soap is glycerine.”
After saponification, each bar needs to cure for roughly one month.
Carter has traveled to sell his soap in the past, but prefers staying local and using the www.feetfaceandfannysoap.com website.
“I’ve learned to mostly stay around the Houlton area,” Carter said. “I can travel miles and spend the night at a motel, but I usually make more money by going to the Houlton Community Market. In addition, I do this craft fair and a few other local fairs around this time of year.”
