Farm Chicks Vintage and Handmade Fair says goodbye

Farm Chicks Vintage and Handmade Fair founder Serena Thompson has always considered herself someone who can make something out of nothing.

That’s one reason she’s always been drawn to digging through dusty, rusty barns and garages to find treasures for rummage sales.

“I love things that I have to work at, or I can make something out of something disregarded,” she said. “When I am in those kinds of situations, it’s really creatively inspiring. It sparks me to find this old stuff and think about what I could do with it.”

Having grown up watching her parents sell goods at flea markets, the idea to organize a rummage sale came quickly to Thompson when a firefighter at her husband’s station was diagnosed with cancer.

Thompson began spreading the word about the rummage sale and received truckload after truckload of goods from neighbors and others looking to help. The sale raised thousands of dollars for the firefighter’s medical bills, giving Thompson the idea to turn the sale into an annual event that raised funds for firefighters in times of need.

After months of discussions, things fizzled out, but Thompson began digging through the barns and cabins of firefighters who donated things to her rummage sale. With more and more inventory on her hands, Thompson realized her idea for an annual sale could still work and founded Farm Chicks.

The first event, in 2002, was supposed to be small, organized in the barn of one of Thompson’s friends in Mead. Thompson told parents at her children’s school about it and reached out to a Spokesman-Review reporter she met at a school event. That reporter wrote a piece about the sale, and Thompson arrived at her friend’s barn the morning of the sale to find 100 people lined up outside.

“In that moment, we thought ‘Wow! This is great. People are wanting something like this,’ ” she said.

And Thompson wanted it, too. Then a stay-at-home mom, she was looking for something that would get her outside the house and was creative. She said it was an amazing feeling to see something she poured her heart into was so widely embraced.

“There was no doubt” that the event would become an annual thing, Thompson said.

The next year, the sale moved to the Five Mile Prairie Grange. After the show got too big for the Grange, Farm Chicks was moved to an outdoor space in Fairfield.

Thompson recalls dealing with flooding bathrooms during the sale, vandalism and even one person who tried to fight her because her booth of imported goods had been rejected from the show, which has always featured vintage and handmade items.

“I want Farm Chicks to feel like it’s a treasure,” she said. “Anybody can take a space and fill it with imported goods or fill it with things that you could find at big box stores or multilevel marketing things, but that’s not special at all. Those things can be found anywhere, and I work extremely hard to have a really unique setup, to have things that are vintage and handmade that you can’t reproduce. It wouldn’t be the same, and I have always said that I will always have an empty space over a space that’s filled with something that doesn’t align with what I want.”

For the 2009 show, Thompson moved Farm Chicks to the Spokane Country Fair and Expo Center. Her husband had been trying to talk her into making that move for a while, but Thompson was reluctant to agree, worried that the new venue would take the small town charm away from the event.

She decided to create an entry installation to give attendees a sense of warmth, bring back some of that charm and set the tone for the show and found that the fairgrounds and Farm Chicks went together hand in hand.

So much so that the one year the sale expanded into all four bays at the fairgrounds, people had to be turned away because the parking lot was completely full. Since then, the show has stuck to three bays and features around 300 booths.

Thompson estimates she accepts one out of every 10 vendor applications and has worked to make sure the show is balanced as far as what is available. She doesn’t want there to be an overwhelming amount of jewelry vendors, for example, to keep things interesting for the attendees and protect the sales of the vendors, which would be spread thin if there were too many vendors selling similar items.

Despite the success of the show, and simply because the timing felt right, Thompson has decided to make this year’s Farm Chicks Vintage and Handmade Fair, Saturday and Sunday at the Spokane County Fair and Expo Center, the last.

The feeling hit Thompson this winter, and she began thinking she might be ready for more. She’s now at peace with the decision but recalls crying when talking it through with her husband.

If any of her children were interested in taking over Farm Chicks, Thompson said she would pass it along, but that’s not the case. She’s fielded offers from people looking to purchase the Farm Chicks brand, but she still wants to hold onto it in case she decides to re-enter the world of vintage markets or bring Farm Chicks back in a new way.

“I might do something else in the vintage world, and I definitely might not,” she said. “It’s just what’s best for me.”

For the time being, she’s excited to spend time writing and working on “Serena Goes to Market,” a video series which takes her to markets around the world.

Thompson said vendors, including some who have come out of retirement to participate in this final show, are bringing their A game, so attendees can expect quality collections from booth to booth.

There may be a few more tears after the shoppers have gone home, but Thompson couldn’t be more proud of what she’s created.

“I had a really challenging childhood and upbringing, and I remember being a child, I didn’t really have toys, so I would go out into the woods, and I would take twigs and bark and rocks, and I would build little villages,” she said. “I remember always thinking ‘I’m really going to do something big one day,’ and this feels like that for me.”