VENTURA : 15,000 Turn Out for 1st Harvest Festival

More than 15,000 people turned out over the weekend for what is expected to be an annual Harvest Festival at the Ventura County Fairgrounds, spokeswoman Kaye Chandler said.

“This has been a phenomenal response. This has broken by several thousand people what we had anticipated,” she said.

The event, which featured arts, crafts and holiday gifts from about 220 exhibitors, included booths filled with everything from incense to batik, and from wooden toys to corn-husk dolls. Most of the goods were handmade by professional artists.

Even though thousands of people wandered through the two large Quonset huts and the tented area in between, some of the vendors said sales were not as brisk as they would have liked.

Lisa Leprone traveled from Santa Cruz to offer her whimsical ceramic animals for sale. She attributed the slow business to the World Series.

“Friday was really slow here, and I think it was because people were home watching baseball,” she said. Saturday and Sunday were busier, she said.

“We all know it’s a risk to come to a first show like this one in Ventura. We have more lookers than buyers, but even if you don’t do gangbusters with sales, it’s good advertising,” Leprone said.

The Harvest Festival got its start in San Francisco in 1973 and now includes 16 shows nationwide through the fall. The show is likely to return to Ventura next year, Chandler said.