This holiday season, meet your makers. Not the algorithms, not the big-box brands. The people. The ones screen-printing in converted garages, concocting soaps made from locally sourced materials, drawing meticulously detailed artwork after the kids are asleep.
When you buy from them, the gift doesn’t stop at the wrapping paper. Your money loops back into the local economy. It fuels the maker culture the Hudson Valley has been known for over many decades.
The Hudson Valley Hullabaloo in Kingston features more than 75 makers, vintage vendors and micro-entrepreneurs from Ulster County and across the valley, all under one very busy roof. It’s loud, bright, and shoulder-to-shoulder, a weekend where shoppers line up not just for candles and ceramics, but for the chance to shake hands with the people who made them.
Barbara Mansfield
At Phoenicia Soap, owner Barbara Mansfield can trace her products back to the pasture. She started making soap on her mother’s goat farm, learning the craft in small batches and cold barns. When she moved to Phoenicia, she shifted into plant-based formulas to match what customers were asking for, turning Hudson Valley-grown botanicals into soaps, sprays, and other everyday essentials.
Online, one product has taken off in a big way. “One of the biggest ways [customers] find me is the No Tick,” she says. It comes as both a spray and a soap, born out of a brutal tick season and a lot of late-night research. Mansfield dug into studies on what ticks really can’t tolerate and landed on oregano oil as the star. “In a certain concentration it will kill ticks,” she explains. The result is a bug-repellent line that drives her web traffic while still fitting neatly into her clean, plant-forward ethos.
Mansfield works directly with local farms, infusing and distilling plants grown nearby — and, as she’s quick to point out, she’s not the only one.“This is my favorite market, of all the markets I do, because these are real makers… they’re making things that are of the area, from things in the area.”
Matt Pleva
Kingston artist Matt Pleva’s work adorns everything from massive murals on the side of Kingston buildings to one-inch pins with near-microscopic brush strokes. His tables at markets like Hullabaloo are stacked with finely inked prints and wildly detailed scenes, the kind of work you have to lean in close to really see.
For Pleva, Hullabaloo isn’t just another weekend. “This is the biggest show of the year for me,” he says. What makes it work, in his eyes, is that it’s built from the inside. “It’s so well-curated, and advertised really well. Danielle [Bliss] does such a good job because she was a maker, so she wanted to put together a show for makers and put together by makers, so they get it.”
He’s also keenly aware of how different the Hudson Valley feels now compared to the one he grew up in. “You and I grew up here. It was tumbleweeds in uptown Kingston,” Pleva says. “Not anymore.” Between comic expos, mural festivals and markets like Hullabaloo, he sees a maker community that’s drawn people to the area and given homegrown artists like him a real shot.
Steve Markota
If you’ve seen a Kingston or Catskills T-shirt that made you grin and reach for your wallet, there’s a good chance it came from Steve Markota’s Boneshaker MMXXII. He’s been at Hullabaloo almost since the beginning — “since it started. I think I only missed two,” he says — and he doesn’t hesitate when asked how it stacks up. “Hands down the best market,” he says. “There’s no other market where I’ve felt such a community presence and good vibes.”
For Markota, that community is rooted in a long local tradition. “It is. It’s awesome,” he says of making his own line in the Hudson Valley. “The rich screen printing history, as you know here, in the ’80s… I’m sure you could drive up 28 and count 10 print shops. Not Fade Away, Grateful Dead, all that stuff.” His own work riffs on that lineage. Early on, when he printed a Kingston shirt, “it was kind of a chuckle, like, oh, that’s funny. Why would you put Kingston on a T-shirt?” Fast forward a few years and “the Catskill Mountains definitely became a brand,” with Boneshaker helping define how that brand looks.
He describes his style as taking “the kind of plastic retro tourist tees” and “making new ones,” right down to a “fun ’90s box” design that feels like it fell out of the old Hudson Valley Mall. People love the area and want to represent it, he says, and there’s a quiet payoff in being the one who supplies that uniform. “It’s simply satisfying to see somebody on the street wearing your shirt,” Markota says — and to know that shirt came from a maker’s shop in Ulster County, not a faceless warehouse.
Raema Frost
Rockerbox Spice Co. is Raema Frost’s passion project. She’s been bringing her meticulously crafted garlic powders, blends, and pickled products to Hullabaloo for “probably a dozen years,” long enough that the market now doubles as her own holiday shopping spot. “I love coming to this one because it’s all my favorite makers,” she says. “I do all my own Christmas shopping here, too, after hours… it’s just such a great curation.”
Rockerbox is a solo operation, and Frost leans into the small-batch nature of it. Her grandparents and great-grandparents were garlic farmers, and she followed that scent into a business built around carefully dehydrated, hand-crafted garlic and onion. The garlic itself is all U.S.-grown, and she makes products like her pickled garlic in a commercial kitchen, turning out jars “all handmade, all really small batch.” New York’s food regulations — “especially the dehydrated foods” — made the early years challenging. “There’s a lot,” she says of the hoops involved, but most of that is now baked into her systems: “That’s all stuff I figured out in my first year of business, so I don’t have to worry about it too much these days.”
Her bestsellers say a lot about how people actually cook: “My roasted garlic dust, my shallot flakes, and my black garlic,” she rattles off. As an avid home cook and self-described foodie, it’s deeply personal. Each jar that leaves her table is a tiny collaboration waiting to happen between a Hudson Valley maker and someone’s dinner.
Nicole Andrick
Catskills Candle Studio was born from a candle habit that got out of hand. Owner Nicole Andrick jokes that it “was purely a mistake” — she loved fancy candles enough to spend $60 or $70 on a single jar, and wanted that same luxe experience at a saner price point. She started pouring candles for friends, who told her she should “do this for real.” When a friend opening a shop during the pandemic said, “put a label on it and put it in,” the side project quietly turned into a business. Five years later, she’s in about 70 stores around the country, with roughly 40 scents, and back at Hullabaloo for her second year.
Everything is rooted in place. Andrick is based in Tannersville, and every candle is made with 100 percent American-grown soy. The scents are “inspired by the Catskills, definitely by nature,” including a best-seller she describes as the smell of the mountains people actually come here to experience. She keeps the operation “very community based,” working with hotels up in the mountains, corporate retreats, and running workshops where guests can pour their own candles — plus a full slate of regional markets.
Despite the growth, this is still technically her side hustle. By day, Andrick is a design director for women’s apparel at Champion, commuting to the city about once a week and spending the rest of her time on the mountaintop. The maker’s life is what makes that schedule worthwhile. “It’s just such a great community — everyone wants to help and support each other,” she says, noting how many people moved up during COVID and helped add to the already-thriving creative scene. Events like Hullabaloo double as reunions and referral networks: “That’s what’s so great about these events, seeing all your friends that you do all these markets with and being able to help cross-promote.”
Luke Sarrantonio
Some makers bring jewelry or prints. Luke Sarrantonio brings an entire hidden kingdom. Under the name Mycophilic, he turns his obsession with fungi into grow kits, education, and community mushroom gardens that are as rooted in local soil as anything else at Hullabaloo. “I didn’t learn about mushrooms growing up,” he says. “In the U.S. it’s really not a part of the curriculum… unless it’s a part of your family tradition or cultural tradition, it’s left out.”
That changed when he took a general ecology course in college. He switched his major so he could focus on fungi and mycology, and has spent the last 12–13 years building programs to share what he found. Today he grows mushrooms, teaches people how to grow them, and works on “small projects, community projects” with groups like the Wallkill Valley Land Trust and Kingston YMCA Farm Project. The idea is simple: put mushroom gardens in backyards, land trusts, and community spaces so more people can literally see this “amazing group of life” at work.
“Everybody should be able to get out and access this type of education,” he says. He keeps base rates to make a living, but stresses that it’s “more important for people to learn about this… because there’s so much potential.”
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