Down Home : Handcrafts Maintain Their Place at County Fair

The two women fought through the Los Angeles County Fair’s gauntlet of hot tub emporiums, encyclopedia salesmen and pitchmen touting high-tech polishing rags. They passed a stand offering “instant credit” and “lifetime lessons” on home pipe organs and at last entered the fair’s Home Arts Building.

“Now, as far as I’m concerned, this is what the fair is all about,” said Beverly Peterson, a native of rural Humboldt County, looking pleasurably around.

Traditional Handcrafts

She and Jackie Short had escaped into a haven for traditional American handcrafts. Painstakingly constructed homemade quilts, stuffed with batting and vibrating with color, spilled luxuriantly across shelves. Wood carvings, hand-woven rugs and homemade toys jostled one another in bins. Stacks of prize-winning preserves, cakes, breads and pies, all displaying a rich, buttery glow, stood temptingly on view.

Peterson looked at the glass-enclosed goodies. “Of course, at home,” she said wistfully, “you could go out and have a piece of homemade pie from one of the many women’s organizations that participated.”

If parts of the fair, which runs through Oct. 2 at the Pomona Fairgrounds, sometimes take on the aspect of a giant fire sale, things are different in the Home Arts Building. Here you get a rare glimpse of the kind of peaceful country life where folks bought their musical instruments (without instant credit) from the Montgomery Ward catalogue and did not know a Jacuzzi from a jumping bean.

“This is the only non-commercial building in the whole place,” boasted Chet Langan, a wood carver from El Monte who produces decorative duck decoys.

Langan was exaggerating a bit--the fair includes other non-commercial buildings, such as the ones featuring livestock and a young people’s crafts exhibit. But the 36,000-square-foot Home Arts Building is a smorgasbord for fair purists, housing about 8,000 entries in a variety of traditional home arts categories. About 900 prizes, ranging from $3 to $200, are awarded in 50 divisions, including quilting, wood carving and barbecuing.

Craftsmen like Langan also demonstrate their skills. Under the gaze of Peterson and Short, a bowl magically rose from a potter’s fingertips, doilies took gradual shape under a lace maker’s nimble bobbins and a spinner fed wool into her spinning wheel.

‘You Just Forget to Eat’

Langan, using a wood-burning stylus, bent over a wooden model of a Canadian goose and laboriously drew each tiny feather on a wooden duck’s head. “In my whole life, I never skipped a meal until I started carving,” he said. “You get so involved you just forget to eat.”

Making decorative decoys is a slow process, explained Langan, who is retired from a career as salesman and merchant. First, you have to research your subject. “Every bird is different,” he said. “You have to study that bird.” Then you carve the bird’s form and begin to burn in the feathers. The process can take anywhere from 100 to 200 hours, he said.

He figured he could sell the Canadian goose for about $450, meaning his carving would earn him as little as $2.25 an hour.

“I told that to a little kid about so high,” said Langan, holding his hand 4 feet up while chuckling, “and he said, ‘Hey, that’s not even minimum wage.’ ”

Over in the quilt area, a group of women worked on a broad piece of salmon-colored material, outlining a traditional eight-pointed star pattern with tiny stitches. Peggy Hansen, who teaches quilt making for Mount San Antonio College and the Claremont School District, took time out from the project to point out some of the fine details in the prize-winning examples on display.

Quilting originated in the Middle Ages when quilters provided knights with padded armor, said Hansen, and the craft was carried to America with the Pilgrims. After a period of post-World War II dormancy, she said, interest surged in the 1970s when new techniques encouraged quilters to develop their own patterns and elegant quilts began to be accepted as works of art.

“That’s when the creative business really came around,” Hansen said.

Many spectators clustered around the grand prize winner, a white, stippled Celtic quilt with a peach-and-blue design, a striking one-year effort by Joyce Huestis of Santa Ana. “This is very difficult to do,” said Hansen, indicating some delicate, flower-like swirls, sewn subtly into the surface like watermarks pressed into paper.

‘Pretty Particular People’

What kind of people make quilts? “Most often, they’re pretty particular people,” she said. “. . . Some people call it a contagious disease. There’s an old saying: ‘Old quilters never die. They just go to pieces.’ ”

Martha Glauthier, a retired teacher from San Dimas, started spinning wool yarn in order to teach her first-graders and second-graders where their clothes came from. Now she works with a traditional, foot-pumped wooden spinning wheel, making her own yarn from unprocessed New Zealand wool.

“The trick is not to go too fast,” Glauthier said while feeding a continuous strand of wool into the wheel. What if the strand breaks? “If you look at wool under a microscope, it looks like it has tiny hooks in it,” she said. “You just work another piece in.”

Glauthier and husband Ted color her yarns with natural dyes, like marigolds, plum leaves, onion skins, walnut hulls and Brazil wood shavings, and turn them into rugs and sweaters.

In another room, contestants in a cake-decorating contest waited tensely as a panel of judges scrutinized their work. This is a declining field, noted judge Chuck Finnegan, a professional cake decorator. “A lot of people aren’t putting in the quality that they used to,” he said gloomily. “Even a lot of professionals are becoming lazy. There’s too much plastic nowadays. It’s kind of depressing.”

Mother’s Day Cake Wins

The judges sniffed disapprovingly at an entry that employed unedible cloth fern leaves and settled on an elegant Mother’s Day cake with dainty white roses and neatly woven basket-like strands of icing on the sides.

“A very good presentation,” Finnegan told first-place winner Cecelia Rubio of Perris in Riverside County.

Rubio, the mother of five children, ages 2 to 15, is a familiar face in the fair’s baking precincts. In 1986, her lemon meringue pie won the best pie prize. What qualities does a good cake decorator need? “Patience,” Rubio said. “You have to be pretty meticulous about what you do. I’m real picky.”

The winner among professionals was Gail Gibson, who produced a cake for a baby shower, complete with icing forming delicate petunias and an edible cradle and teddy bear. “With exhibitions like this,” said Gibson, who teaches cake decorating in Alta Loma in San Bernardino County, “it seems like a real country fair.”