My wife, Vidya, crafts gourds and sells them at shows in order to make a living. I used to grow them for her but as my physical strength tanked I had to abandon that. My lack of vigor coupled with increased pressure from expanding populations of gourd predators like deer and groundhogs made it untenable to continue, so now she has to buy then from growers we meet at the gourd shows and from an Amish guy in Pennsylvania.
But buy them she does and merrily crafts away. While not a job for someone with a lot of material desires, it does produce enough income for the essentials and enables her to work flex time at home.
Producing crafts is one thing, selling them is another, and the difficulty of doing so has forced a lot of New Vrindaban crafters to either give up or never really get started. I had always hoped that someone on the community level would come forward and form a marketing co-operative for NV products but that is one of those ideas that lose their luster when forced to compete with the simplicity of accepting handouts from Hindus. Still, somehow Vidya has managed to survive.
She recently got accepted into a show she has been trying to get into for years, the Shaker Woods Festival. It is a good show that her stuff will do well at and is in August when she doesn’t have any other shows.
The good shows are juried — a panel of judges checks out your stuff and decides if you fit their show. Once a crafter gets into these shows, they will keep coming back every year as long as they can, so not that many openings become available each year. Typically there are hundreds of applicants for those openings.
Shaker Woods jurying process was based on mailing in samples of work and/or slides. Year after year Vidya sent them in and was always unsuccessful, a common reason given that “We already have a gourd person”. This year she managed to get an appointment to go in and personally show her stuff to the judges. She has a wide range of items not easy to capture on film or with a couple of samples.
Once the judges saw her things, they loved it and gave her verbal acceptance on the spot, realizing her stuff was completely different than their existing gourd vendor. We weren’t surprised. We always knew she would be an asset for that show and had been frustrated at the repeated rejections, so she was quite happy that she finally got accepted.
The lesson is if you believe in something, don’t take no for an answer, and that if the conventional way doesn’t work, try to find another.
