The Yomitan Pottery Festival

One Sunday afternoon in December after church services, our group went to one of the local restaurants for lunch. As we were talking one of the girls, Erin, mentioned that she had gone to the Yomitan Pottery Festival on Friday and loved the bowls she found there. She said it was being held the entire weekend and ending that day. Charla asked if I'd like to try to find it. She said she'd take me home afterwards so Russ could take the car home. We met back at her house and left two of her girls with her husband and took her oldest with us to the festival.

We weren't sure where it was located. We just knew the general direction and were going off of where Google Maps was directing us (which many times can be far from where you want to go). After quite a few wrong turns we found the castle ruins in Yomitan (which I'd like to return to at some point) and finally found signs leading to the Pottery village. Yomitan, I've been told, is the place all the artsy type of people seem to gravitate towards. I think they do these pottery festivals and other artsy type festivals several times a year. It was very crowded when we arrived and it took us a little while to find a place to park.

We spent the afternoon walking from vendor to vendor looking at the various pieces and looking for something that we just couldn't live without. As we entered one of the vendor stores, we met an old man who was playing tunes on a leaf. I call it leaf harping. When he spotted us he started playing Star Spangled Banner for us. I wanted Wrenn to see what he was doing so I asked him to show her how it worked. She ran and got her own leaf and tried to learn how to do it but it proved to be harder than it looked. Several others saw him showing her so they also grabbed leaves and tried it out and shook their heads because they, too, couldn't make it work. He was cute...walked through the whole festival singing away on his leaf harp.

Since we were at the festival on the last day it was open we found that the offerings were slimmer.The areas with the more reasonable prices had very slim pickings by Sunday.  I was hoping to find some salad bowls I liked but when I did, I couldn't justify spending $80 on two bowls. I finally convinced myself that I have too many dishes already and didn't need to add to the pile. There were some beautiful but pricey pieces there. We enjoyed the time together shopping and talking and learning to leaf harp. Maybe I'll catch it on the first day next time.