Three for the road

Once a year, Callie Hulslander Cooper has a real girls’ weekend.

She leaves the kids at home with dad, packs her bags and takes off for exotic Spokane. She, her mother and her sister make the four-hour drive to join some 5,000 other women at the Farm Chicks Show.

“It’s kick-in-the-pants fun,” she said.

The annual trip started about five years ago for Cooper.

She attended the antique and vintage-inspired show when it was still mostly off the radar and held in rural Fairfield, Wash.

Cooper was just a shopper then, but she soon found herself on the vendor list peddling the hand-crafted jewelry she shows as a partner in Bigfork’s Persimmon Gallery and at the Stone Chair in Kalispell.

Cooper, Allison Young and Collette Gross will represent the Flathead antique and jewelry scene at the eighth annual Farm Chicks Show in Spokane next weekend.

The show was born out of a small rummage sale held to raise money for a terminally ill volunteer fir fighter in rural Washington but has since grown to proportions founder Serena Thompson said she never would have predicted.

“I certainly didn’t imagine people coming from all over the country,” she told the Inter Lake.

From being held in a friend’s barn to taking over the Spokane County Fairgrounds for a full weekend, the show now boasts 150 participants and more than 5,000 attendees.

Thompson also has created a spin-off business with two published books, contributing editor status at Country Living magazine and a nationally followed blog. Thompson’s niche is to take a mundane object and make it special. She tries to bring exposure to “the completely basic things our grandparents were doing.”

Since Farm Chicks is a juried show, only about one in every 10 vendors who applies is accepted, Thompson said.

“It’s real difficult to get into,” Young said. “I’m excited to be a part of it.”

This will be Young’s first time at the show.

She first learned about the Farm Chicks a little more than a year ago while attending a different showcase in Idaho. She applied too late to make last year’s show, and was put on a waiting list for this year until another jeweler dropped out.

“I was really lucky to get in before it got really big,” Cooper said. “It’s just a really fun show.”

Gross, founder of Shops at Station 8 in Columbia Falls, turned in her application months ago.

“You wait and you wait and then you find out and say ‘Yay!’” Gross said. She actually screamed right in the middle of her store when she heard she had been accepted. “They let this little old Montana gal in!” she said. “It’s a very cool, very big deal.”

While Cooper is now a seasoned veteran, this is the first time for Gross as a vendor. She attended the show in 2005 as a shopper and fell in love with the atmosphere and energy of the participants.

“It’s just so real,” she said of the talent and creativity she saw on display.

Being able to showcase a story within the display is part of the application criteria. Vendors pay $250 for each 10-by-10-foot booth they fill.

In booth 60, Cooper will create a vintage vignette combining about 200 samples of her original jewelry.

She works primarily with gold and both precious and semi-precious stones and employs silk threading in her work, a technique she said is difficult to master but well worth the effort. A full-time mom, she creates her jewelry late at night after her children are quietly tucked in bed.

Young will present her brand, Thread and Petal, in booth 175. Thread and Petal is the name she has given to the fabric flowers she creates to adorn hairpieces and jewelry.

She also creates both beaded and fabricated metal jewelry, a craft she has been honing since high school and once studied at Colorado State University. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Young passed free time in Botswana working on her jewelry before moving to Kalispell, where her father is a custom goldsmith, a few years ago.

Gross will create a fantasy world straight out of a Rudyard Kipling novel, transporting shoppers to a camping journey in the 1930s in booths 187 and 188.

Calling it “British colonialism meets Montana,” Gross will combine cane and wicker with burlap and mosquito netting. She will display a daybed draped in linen, old British safari helmets and binoculars, old black typewriters, camp chairs, plantation shutters and boxy luggage.

“I’m painting a romantic picture of what it would be like if you were wealthy in the 1930s going out camping,” Gross said.

Business reporter Erika Hoefer may be reached at 758-4439 or by e-mail at ehoefer@dailyinterlake.com