photo by: Mike Yoder

Maxine James, a 79-year-old retiree, will make her arts-and-crafts fair debut at Saturday's Spring Arts and Crafts Fair. James, seen here in her Lawrence home, creates decorated vases and bowls with jute rope and fabric which she fills with cacti and succulents. She calls her business Cactus in a Jar.

Maxine James is still getting used to the occupational injuries of her new hobby.

“You burn your fingers on the hot glue,” she says, explaining the messy practice of wrapping jute rope around vases and bowls. “It’s like sewing when you run the needle through your finger.”

At 79, after years of handcrafting pep-club uniforms and graduation dresses for her now-grown daughters, the retired network administrator recently launched Cactus in a Jar.

photo by: Mike Yoder

Maxine James, a 79-year-old retiree, will make her arts-and-crafts fair debut at Saturday's Spring Arts and Crafts Fair. James, seen here in her Lawrence home, creates decorated vases and bowls with jute rope and fabric which she fills with cacti and succulents. She calls her business Cactus in a Jar.

James’ one-woman enterprise, which sells cacti and succulents in hand-embellished glass containers, will be one of 80 exhibitors at the Lawrence Parks and Recreation Department’s annual Spring Arts and Crafts Festival.

Slated for 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Douglas County Fairgrounds, the festival is expected to draw upwards of 5,000 people to Lawrence this weekend, says Duane Peterson, Parks and Recreation special event supervisor.

“Usually ours kicks off the season of arts-and-crafts shows in the Midwest,” he says of the fair, which will host vendors from such states as Colorado, Texas and even Oregon. “That’s why we get so many this time of year.”

With warmer weather on the horizon, festival attendees will have their fair share of yard art, birdhouses and gardening items to pick from Saturday, Peterson says. Also among the lineup: homemade dog treats and accessories, textile crafts, goat’s milk skincare products, ceramics, stained-glass jewelry, baked goods and plenty of home decor.

Saturday marks James’ first appearance on the arts-and-crafts circuit, at least as a vendor of handmade goods. The Avon representative also has a knack for assembling gift baskets, which she’s sold under the Avon name at Topeka-area craft shows.

Now, with her sewing machine having “bit the dust” and her children grown, she’s found a new creative outlet with Cactus in a Jar.

“I saw the jute wrapping on TV one day and thought ‘that’s pretty cool,'” James says of her fledgling venture. “So, I had a vase here and I tried it.”

photo by: Mike Yoder

Maxine James, a 79-year-old Lawrence retiree, will make her arts-and-crafts fair debut at Saturday's Spring Arts and Crafts Fair. James creates decorated vases and bowls with jute rope and fabric which she fills with cacti and succulents. She calls her business Cactus in a Jar.

Often, she’ll start out with a specific item — at the moment, James has found inspiration in a set of miniature garden tools scored at Michael’s — and then builds a theme around it. Recent creations have included nautical motifs, for example, or a Southwestern-style piece embellished with jalapeno-patterned fabric and tiny Mexican dolls.

James says she prefers cacti and succulents because they’re low-maintenance, slow-growing, survive well indoors and don’t seem to attract the diseases that plague other plants — or, as she puts it, “I would hate to sell somebody something and they didn’t take care of it and in two weeks the darn thing’s dead.”

For those especially bereft of gardening skills, she’s keeping a few artificial cacti in the mix Saturday. Prices should range from $10 all the way up to $40, for some of the more elaborate live-plant ensembles.

In the meantime, she’s thinking about turning that spare bedroom of hers into a crafting room.

“I’m either going to sell out the first two hours or I’m going to come home with all these plants,” James says. “You just don’t know.”

If you go

What: Lawrence Parks and Recreation Department’s Spring Arts and Crafts Festival

When: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday

Where: Douglas County Fairgrounds, 2110 Harper St., Building 21

Cost: The event is free and open to the public.