Waldorf School Harvest Faire
This is what the Sacramento Waldorf School Harvest Faire (held October 13) looked like to me. In all of these photos I’ve tried to capture a small glimpse into the tremendous effort and creativity required to bring off this wonderful school fundraiser festival. Each year I am inspired by the depth of commitment and strength of community that this event represents.
Many families cooked and baked goodies to be sold at Cafe Waldorf.
Each class sang the songs they’ve been working on in music class, and some brave performers took to the stage for fun and to entertain the diners. Many other performers took to the main stage. We heard a terrific young man playing violin.
Kids (and kittens) made fairy gardens with clothespin fairies and gems. And plenty of glitter glue.
The campus was decorated beautifully with fall pumpkins, cornstalks, flowers, scarecrows, and more.
The Country Store sold handmade items and housewares, children’s toys, edibles, bath and body items, holiday items, and lots of crafting and handwork supplies. I’m a little sorry I didn’t buy a bag of raw wool, but I knew I’d have difficulty finding time to use it.
This gorgeous Autumn Fairy Mother was handmade. I’m sorry I never got the name of the artist. I thought she was just beautiful.
The sixth grade’s Michaelmas dragon was on hand and perfectly tame. He posed with knights and ladies for photographs.
Amazing vendors were present, like The Puppenstube‘s own Christine Schreier. We had a lovely chat about mermaids and heavy baby dolls and I took her photo as she sewed on a doll, but she’s shy. Here is her collection of Buntsprecht wooden figures for sale.
And here is the spooky and charming work of our own Mrs. Passie. She carves these beautiful gourds and makes amazing gourd lamps that cast lovely stars and patterns on the walls of a dark room. My son tells me that he’s been making a gourd lamp at school with Mrs. Passie’s instruction.
Food vendors were terrific, and our class did a wildly successful tri-tip and mushrooms sandwiches booth. I’m told that the line was long and constant. Many thanks to our parent volunteers who manned the booth, but especially to Sean and Heather for spearheading this effort and procuring all the supplies. I even heard Sean say, “next year when we do this, we’ll …” so I guess he feels pretty great about it, too.
This year Katie and I worked on the Archery booth. We both expressed a strong opinion at a meeting last spring that archery just had to be at the faire. Thus, it became our problem to make it so. Katie did absolutely all the legwork and communications before the faire. I showed up the day before to set up, and then Ian and I worked most of the day of to make sure the booth ran smoothly, safely, and had happy customers. We had great parent volunteers from our fifth grade class, thank goodness. And even the fifth graders played a huge part in setting everything up. Did you know a small group of 10s and 11s can move 15 hay bales? They can! One of the grandpas donated new arrows and six children’s bows to the Harvest Faire, which means that the archery booth can appear at Harvest Faire year after year. Which is great because it did a very brisk business all day long and we had archers ranging from 3 to 75 shooting that day!
Asher and Lucas loved archery and spent most of our faire money on arrows for another chance to shoot.
The cake walk was popular as always.
Beautiful colors, beautiful children, beautiful families were everywhere. The weather was warm and lovely. I think the whole thing was a huge success.
My kids loved having their parents busy and committed all day. It meant that they could run around campus with their friends! They love having the opportunity to be independent, to go where they like and not have to ask. Although this event was open to the public, I feel safe knowing our community is there and everyone is watching out.
And then, at the very end of a long, tiring, and happy day, we all flopped out. It was worth it!
October 25, 2012 at 8:07 am
what an amazing faire! so much going on. 🙂
October 28, 2012 at 3:28 pm
Your pictures really capture all the beauty and community of the day! Thanks for sharing!