More Exhibitions, and the Festival Site at last

I finally got a chance to go down to the Festival site this afternoon. There was even a bit of sunshine! It's been re-organised so that the main entrance is a bit further round than previous years, and laid out inside differently. It's actually a bit easier to navigate, I thought. There seemed to be food and drink everywhere - the Richard Booth Cafe, the local/organic tent with Welsh venison and seafood and pizzas and real ale, various cafes, XOX organics van and Shepherd's ice cream. I stopped to chat with Richard Evans, who has a stand there selling his own prints and his partner Shelley Faye Lazar's silk scarfs.
Athene English is there again with tweed and tribal jackets and a selection of other things from her shop on Castle Street, and Hay Does Vintage is there with a selection of vintage clothing, including some rather gorgeous Japanese kimonos.
Hay Does Vintage have also put out a map of all the vintage and antique shops in Hay, to go with the bookseller map that has been produced for many years. They've got eleven listed, plus two stalls on the Thursday market and the four charity shops. They're doing a "Town of Temptation" day on Sunday 30th June, with 60 traders scattered around Hay in four locations (a marquee - presumably on the Square, the Buttermarket, St Johns Place and the Parish Hall).
Instead of getting the shuttle bus back, I decided to walk along the Brecon Road to have a look at the stalls that have mushroomed in several front gardens along the way. I got a jar of marmalade from one (in aid of a charity I can't now remember), and there were knitted items and wooden crafts. There's one rather nice antique tent - I stopped to read the sign attached to a chair outside, which gave a story of how old it was when various historical events were going on, from 1770 to the present. Inside the lady had some suffragette jewellery - made in the colours of the Votes for Women campaign of white, green and violet. She said she'd had to explain to one customer what suffragettes had been, and I told her I'd had to explain what Hanoverian meant to a lady on the phone recently (she had bought some eighteenth century silver spoons which had been described to her as Hanoverian, and she had no idea that the word related to the three Georges who reigned for the majority of that century).
A little further along, the Masonic Hall was full of local artwork and photography, with a coffee tent outside, and there's a house opposite the Swan with a garden full of baskets.



Back in town, I went round the art exhibition by the Clock Tower (lots of cloudscapes), the art and antique place next door (Russian icons, African items, French silver, antique furniture and some paintings), and Tinto House gardens and gallery, with some more burned wooden sculptures (they get displayed there every year).
Further along Broad Street, I saw this:



It was outside the shop that used to be the Hay Craft Company, and before that has been a book shop. Inside was the work of two artists who work in the Black Mountains, one of whom carves wood to look like pillows and socks, and a painter who had several studies of draped fabric.
Up in Brook Street Pottery, meanwhile, there was an exhibition of slipware by Paul Young and stained glass by Daniella Wilson-Dunne - which looked like this:



So many beautiful things....