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Festival goers walk past food truck options. (photo by Gillian Stawiszynski).

Arts and Crafts booths stretch through the downtown green. (Photo by Gillian Stawiszynski).

Backwoods Boogie boxes co-owner Wren Knight shows off one of her hand-crafted instruments. (Photo by Gillian Stawiszynski).

Kathy Milans poses with her Kentucky Fiber Arts. This is only half of her display, with the entire display at the festival taking about a year to craft. (Photo by Gillian Stawiszynski). 

Barely Shaken String Band is the festival’s first musical act with Joel Klepac on the fiddle, Joy Miracle on the guitar and the washboard, and Conrad Shiba on Banjo standing in for Jim Coogan. (Photo by Gillian Stawiszynski).

The 25th Arts and Crafts festival in Wilmore took place the first weekend of October. The event packed Wilmore’s main street with about 80 arts and crafts vendors from all over the bluegrass. 

Several food trucks lined the road in front of Drinkling’s coffee house– hot meals from Colombian arepas to Mexican churros and American fare was available for festival goers. The weekly Wilmore farmer’s market was also present, selling all kinds of fresh produce and artisanal goods. 

The vendors offered everything from fiber art, clothing and accessories, and paintings, to seasonings, baked goods, and soaps and lotions. 

Live music was also playing tunes, with the Jessamine County-based Barely Shaken String band opening for the festival causing the bluegrass sounds of a fiddle, a guitar, a banjo, and the occasional washboard to echo throughout downtown. 

This summer, Wren Knight is a Nicholasville local who started crafting handmade instruments with her partner, Derrick Jay, who is also a tattoo artist. Knight said “the stars aligned.”

Their business is called Backwoods Boogie Boxes and information can be found on backwoodsboogieboxes.com. Knight said it all started when one night, she had gone to fix her six-string, and when she came back, Jay came over with a one string he had made. She was instantly interested, and wanted to make one herself. Ever since, she has been deeply into wood shaping calling it a therapeutic experience.

Wren is sharing a booth with a friend, Jaclynn England, who sells her own pieces through her company called Cedar Top Crafts based in Nicholasville. England can be found on Etsy by her business’s name. Although many of Knight’s instruments are made by her and her partner, England also has taken part in the process of creating these boogie boxes. “It’s truly been a collaboration between three artists,” Knight said. 

While at the festival, Wren said her goal was to one day extend her and Jay’s workshop past her garage and mudroom into an additional mobile studio in a trailer. 

“So when we do stuff like this we can just roll up, park the trailer, open up our windows and just sit down and talk to people and have the ability to customize some things and make repairs,” Knight said.

In the future, she said she also wants to use that mobile workshop to “get to the point where when we have disasters like [Hurricane Helene] we can go into those areas and help the musicians get back on their feet,” she said, so the musicians can at least still have their music in times of destruction. 

Kathy Milans was present with a multitude of fiber art pieces for sale in many different color pallets. Milans lives on the Kentucky River just outside of Wilmore. Every year, she attends the festival to sell her pieces at a reasonable price, she says, just to keep buying the materials to continue creating her artwork. She’s been creating these pieces for five or six years and said she just “loves the process.” She’ll be up spending all night on her work and then at 2 a.m. she said she’ll gasp, and head to bed. 

All of the pieces are “hand-woven. A lot of them have hand spun yarn in them, a lot of the yarn is dyed, a lot of these have embroidery on them or are felted also. Everyone is unique. It’s all intuitively done. I work from the bottom up and I let the lord tell me what comes next, because I don’t know,” Milans said. 

All of the pieces are hung from beaver sticks from the Dix or Kentucky Rivers. “So I take my kayak up every fall and gather the sticks and bring them back in my kayak, so this is Kentucky river fiber art because I live on the Kentucky river,” she said. 

She also gets the wool locally, from the May sheep festival in Lexington. “It really brings you back to the grassroots, you feel like this pioneer woman out there with your tub washing this and the smell of the sheep. The whole process is just so much fun. And to dye the yarn and see the different colors you can create,” Milans said. “I’m always trying something different as you can tell. Every piece is unique.”

Milans can be contacted at 859-858-0750 and her website is www.pathoflifeministry.org.