Buy Local- Portland Saturday Market

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Posted By Lauren

The name “Saturday Market” is a bit misleading. If you went downtown today, Sunday, you could peruse the stalls of arts and crafts vendors at Saturday Market. Saturday Market operates from 10am - 5pm on Saturdays and 11am - 4:30pm on Sundays, underneath the Burnside Bridge on the west side. Since outdoor markets are more pleasant when the outdoors are more pleasant, Saturday Market closes for most of the winter and reopens in March. However, the Christmas shopping season is way too profitable to miss, so the Saturday Market is open until Christmas Eve. In fact, the Saturday Market has special hours in the days right before Christmas. The marketplace will be open from 11am-6pm Dec. 18-24. Can’t make it all the way to the Burnside Bridge? Some vendors from the Saturday Market will be in Pioneer Square Dec. 5-7 and 12-14 from 11am-6pm, so you can spend that hard earned dollar doing holiday shopping on your lunchbreak, right outside your downtown office.

Like Last Thursday, Saturday Market is a regular Portland commercial event and another fabulous opportunity to buy local for the holidays. A great deal of the vendors at Saturday Market are local artisans, but be careful; there are some stalls that only sell mass produced cheaply made materials from Asia. I don’t have any advice for you about this issue except to ask the vendors how and where their products are made. There are vendors with hand-poured, beeswax, or soy/hemp candles. Vendors with lamps, carvings, forged iron, vases, and pillows. One of my favorites: tin can lamps that cast amazing shaped shadows. Don’t forget that more traditional art (stuff that goes on walls) makes great gifts,too, and it makes you look really cultured and in-the-scene.

There is a coupon for a Saturday Market gift certificate in the Chinook Book.

www.portlandsaturdaymarket.com

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