Puppets and jewelry fun for all ages

SEELEY LAKE - Stevensville artist Trinity Gibson offers a unique pairing of hand puppets and jewelry at her Seeley Lake Market stand. This is her third year working as a merchant for the market, having skipped last year because of COVID-19.

Gibson has been making beaded and charmed jewelry for roughly 22 years.

"When I was pregnant with my son, my sister-in-law sent me a little bag of beads to keep me busy because we were new in a town far, far away from home," she said. "I just fell in love with it and I've been doing it ever since."

She uses what she calls a "nesting pattern" for her beadmaking. Essentially she groups together beads of a similar color scheme and/or tone and strings them from there. In previous years her charms seemed to have garnered the most attention but as of recent, people have been coming to her "actual jewelry designs" especially her earrings.

She began making puppets around six years ago on a dare. Her friend who owns Upcycled, a boutique in Missoula using recycled materials, told her that several of his vendors were already making jewelry. He encouraged her to make "something that nobody else is making."

"My husband says, 'Honey, you've played with puppets with the kids their whole life and why would you want to do anything else?'" Gibson said. "It's been great. We have sold about 2,500 puppets since I started."

Her most popular puppets are dragons, moose and unicorns.

She uses a similar "nesting pattern" approach to her puppets as well. Her puppets are made of multiple upcycled materials like scarves, stuffing, felt, fleece, feathers and pom poms.

"[They're made of] anything that just screams, 'I want to be a kid again,'" she said. "When you get it right and it feels right, and a customer sees it, there's a certain smile that comes along with that. And it's really a pleasure to make people smile. ... People are ... really searching for that one piece they can take back home with them [from] Montana."

Gibson currently plans to sell her products mostly in Seeley Lake and Stevensville, however, she has previously sold her products in Hamilton, Great Falls and Kalispell. Her favorite aspect of selling at the Seeley Lake Market is the community that comes along with it.

"These [people] are my family," she said. "And it doesn't even matter if I know their name, I know that there isn't a single person here that I couldn't trust. And the people in Seeley are phenomenal. The locals especially are completely supportive of the market. They always turn out."