Holiday arts and crafts shows at five sites this weekend

Dodie Eisenhauer remembers the morning 14 years ago she arose at 6 with a crazy idea in her head about making a bow out of the wire mesh in window screens. She discovered that working with wire mesh will make a mess of your hands. She also found out that wire mesh is capable of assuming beautiful shapes.

Now the Daisy, Mo., woman sells wire mesh angels and ornaments and other creations all over the country, and she employs nine people to help her keep up with the orders.

Eisenhauer will be one of an estimated 700 vendors selling arts and crafts items at five sites in the Cape Girardeau area this weekend. The three separate shows annually attract more than 10,000 shoppers.

One of the shows, the Crafts, Gifts and Collectibles Show at the Bavarian Halle in Jackson, opens this afternoon and continues through the weekend. The other two shows -- The River Valley Craft Club Show at the Holiday Inn Convention Center and the A.C. Brase Arena Building and the Christmas Arts & Crafts Bazaar at the Show Me Center and the Osage Community Centre -- run Saturday and Sunday only.

Eisenhauer, who will have a booth at the Show Me Center, has a shop in Daisy called Grandma's House. It really was her grandma's house. Right now the house is filled with hundreds of items made from wire mesh: angels, baskets, ornaments, a wine carrier and similar items in 24 colors applied with an air compressor.

Most are the size to be put on doors or Christmas trees, but one of her bows was 9-by-12 feet and used to adorn the side of a department store in California. She just sold a bow to Universal Studios to be used for a wreath that will be made out of Woody Woodpeckers.

The FBI ordered some of her angels to use as centerpieces for a party. Princess Cruises also is a customer.

Her biggest angel is 5 feet tall and is loaned to local churches.

Behind the shop sits a warehouse called Village Designs where some of the items are assembled and where the raw materials are stored. Eisenhauer orders aluminum screen wire by the 100-foot roll. She also makes some items from copper screen, but that costs four times as much. She also has diversified from wire mesh into making bowls from electric fence wire.

Various instruments like screwdrivers and spoons can be used to work the screen wire, but it still comes down to hands-on contact. Gloves are no good, although sometimes she tapes her fingers.

"Sometimes we joke that we keep the Band-Aid industry going," she says.

Her crew works year-round. Eisenhauer is just about the only employer in the village of 50. She trains each of her employees herself. Many work at home, following her designs for each item the company markets.

Among her employees is her 94-year-old father, Delos Sebaugh, who is in charge of all the angels' haloes.

Some of her children -- Aaron Eisenhauer, Jenny Turner and Jadie Eisenhauer -- also contribute by working on the Web site or making displays.

Eisenhauer painted folk art before switching to wire mesh. One year she took her paintings and a few of the wire mesh creations to a gift show and saw that the wire mesh sculptures were what sold.

She thinks she was the first to make sculptures out of wire mesh. Many people are doing it now, but her designs are copyrighted.

"I was doing angels before they were popular," she said. "Then everybody was doing angels."

She is a charter member of an organization called Best of Missouri Hands. A number of the other vendors at the Show Me Center also are members of the organization, which promotes the arts by offering juried work deemed "superior in quality."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182