photo by: Elvyn Jones

Gloria and Jerry Roach display some of the crafts they created in their Vinland Valley home for the Maple Leaf Festival the third weekend in October.

Donna Curran, longtime booth committee chair for the Maple Leaf Festival, said it takes something different for a first-time vendor to earn a spot at the popular autumn festival.

Most of the vendors return year after year, and the 361 booth spaces usually are claimed four to five months before the festival. She does hold a few each year, though, for something different. This year, the application of the husband-and-wife team of Jerry and Gloria Roach caught her eye.

“It was unique,” she said. “They do a lot of wonderful things. She’s an artist, and Jerry is a wonderful woodworker.”

It’s difficult to sum up what she and her husband will bring to their booth at the Maple Leaf Festival, Gloria said.

“It’s really kind of hard to explain,” she said. “It’s not just one thing, but a lot of different things. People just need to come by and see.”

The Vinland Valley couple will have a booth in the 600 block of High Street, Gloria said. Among Gloria’s works are acrylic pours, which she creates by pouring liquid paint onto wood or canvas.

“I then tilt it to move the paint around,” she said. “It creates cool and unusual designs.”

Gerry is a woodworker who used to be co-owner of Baldwin Furniture Company. The ‘furniture’ in the business name doesn’t really reveal the scope of the work Jerry and his partners performed. In Lawrence, they were responsible for all the woodwork in Free State Brewing Company and built the replacement arched windows at the historic limestone church at 11th and New Hampshire streets that is now an office building.

He and a partner were also the lead contractors on the reconstruction of Osborne Memorial Chapel at Baker University, Jerry said. The limestone village church was shipped piece by piece from England to be reassembled on the Baker campus in Baldwin City.

He won’t be bringing furniture to the festival but smaller pieces of woodworking art, such as earrings made of different types of wood, two carved sperm whales, wind chimes and carved sunflower arrangements, Jerry said.

The couple owns a limestone house north of Vinland that dates to the county’s early days, Gloria said.

“We just found out from a friend of ours that our house was on the Underground Railroad,” she said. “I knew we had one of the oldest standing houses in Douglas County, but I did not know that.”

Some of the pieces she will bring to Maple Leaf are made from the inside paneling salvaged when the couple renovated a wood-frame summer kitchen added onto the house by the original builders, Gloria said.

Maple Leaf will be Jerry’s first craft show, but will mark a return for Gloria. About 20 years ago, she sold ceramic Santa Claus pieces and wreaths in a booth she shared with Laura Morford, now Baldwin City clerk.

If they have a successful weekend, he and his wife might consider doing more shows, Jerry said.

“We’ll see how it goes,” he said. “If it goes well, why not? If it doesn’t, we’ll have a lot of Christmas presents.”