Friends...

My good friends, Greta and Madonna. They have been at the open air market from the start. Greta is not only a well loved local and talented basket maker/bamboo sock tie dyer but also one of our neighbors. Madonna and I have become great friends in the last 4-5 yrs. and we have a funny story about how we first met. It was my first "moose dropping festival" in the summer of 2006. She had been doing it for years and is an awsome jeweler. We were only a few booths away from each other and her truck was parked next to our Jeep behind my booth. Luna was just a young puppy at the time and we had tied her to the handle of our back door while we were unloading and setting up. Well at some point Madonna noticed some scratches on her truck, above the wheel well, near where Luna was tied up and informed us she had jumped up and scratched the paint. Nobody actually saw it happen, including Madonna, but she swears that was how they got there and at the time she was a total stranger to us. We apologized for the scratches if in fact she had done it ,which was totally possible, and I'll never forget her saying "man my husband is going to be pissed!" I now know her husband pretty well and he's a big teddy bear of a biker dude, soft spoken with a long beard (of course I don't think I would want to piss him off eighter). But it was a year or two later when the Open Air Market was started and I met her again, since then she's become one of my closest friends in Alaska, someone I will keep in touch with for life. Those are the friendships that are really important to me and I'm lucky to have several women in my life like that... I also love this picture because they are both wearing my new Butterfly designs as well, too cute!