Handmade Heaven

What, Mr. Fudge and Capt. Garlic at an arts and crafts show? Call Guinness. Was it chance, fate? A once-in-a-lifetime encounter?

Well, since both are part of the Harvest Festival at the Anaheim Convention Center, try every year for at least a decade.

As the 28th annual event got underway Friday, you could count on a few things: Santa Claus and jewelry makers, people using baby carriages to lug their purchases, fudge from the avuncular Fred Heminger--a.k.a. Mr. Fudge--and a guy wearing a big fluffy hat shaped like a garlic bulb.

It’s not your grandma’s arts and crafts show. Well, maybe it is, if she’s the sort who prefers handmade, and has a penchant for the eccentric and humorous.

The craft festival, which runs through Sunday, is America’s oldest and largest touring crafts marketplace, spokeswoman Connie Baker said. It travels from Las Vegas to Fresno.

Securing a booth for your artistry isn’t easy. Thousands apply, but a jury decides who deserve the 300 spaces. All items for sale must be handmade, and jurors inspect slides and samples carefully to ensure the goods are handmade, said Wanda McAleese, senior group manager for the Harvest Festival.

On Friday, there were traditional wares: furniture, glasswork, pillows, candles and dolls. Cheryl Brenner and sister-in-law Deanna Brenner of Newcastle, Calif., offered Santa Clauses with unique faces dressed in fabrics made from antique clothes. Often buyers want one customized for that special person.

“We’ll have people who ask, ‘Can you make him look like Uncle Larry?’ ” Cheryl Brenner said.

They can. And being at the show offers a sea of faces that could make for new Santa faces, she said.

Astute buyer Diana Roberts, 42, of Diamond Bar on Friday snapped up at least two new Santas to add to her collection of more than 75. She owns so many of various sizes she keeps many of them in a hangar at a small airport in La Verne where her husband works as a doctor.

“I choose Santas based on the faces--I love these faces,” she said.

Not far away was Chuck Griva, 64, a brawny man from Gilroy, Calif., where garlic rules and Buffy the Vampire Slayer need not offer her services. “It’s chic to reek,” deadpanned Griva, who calls himself Capt. Garlic.

Griva, who sells everything garlic, boasts that he and his wife, Carol, come from a place where if kids “don’t have garlic breath, they’re expelled from school.”

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In a similar, if less pungent vein, there was also Fred Heminger, best known as Mr. Fudge. Though he and wife, Susie, live and work in Palm Springs, they came from northern Michigan, regarded as the heart of fudge.

The chocolate confection was invented in Mackinac Island, Mich., said Heminger, bragging that he’s only “three steps removed from the guy who invented fudge.”

“You can’t go to northern Michigan and not buy fudge, just like you can’t go to the Napa Valley and not buy wine,” Heminger said.

More than a few who visited the booths on Friday skipped work. Jan Stinebaugh, 54, of Cypress and Linda Van Raden, 53, of Long Beach took vacation days from the Boeing plant in Long Beach to buy holiday decorations.

Why skip work when they could just go on Saturday or Sunday? “Things won’t be here if we come later,” Van Raden said.