For the past 38 summers, the Central Oregon Saturday Market has drawn visitors to downtown Bend with handmade candles and clothes, jewelry, art, food and more.

Beyond their largely locally made wares, several of the vendors have interesting stories to tell of how they learned their craft, and how they came to spend their summers at the Saturday Market.

From cigar box to guitar

Steve Dahm, the self-titled “Low-Budget Luthier,” sat in the shade Saturday picking out a tune on a stubby guitar he built from a cigar box.

A retired artist and engineer as well as a longtime musician, Dahm started building guitars of his own about five years ago.

“They’re a traditional instrument that found popularity during the Depression,” Dahm said. “Some of your blues greats — Howling Wolf, B.B. King — learned to play on simple, homemade instruments.”

Small wooden boxes were an innovation in cigar packaging during the Depression, Dahm said, and somebody soon figured out that the boxes could produce a clean, resonating sound.

By adding necks made of broom handles or scrap wood and strings often pilfered from screen doors, the first cigar box guitars were born.

While Dahm’s guitars feature factory-made guitar strings and an internal electric pickup, they’re not far off from their Depression-era cousins, with just three strings and a fretless neck, and a length of rope for a strap.

Typically played with a glass or metal slide, the guitars are easier to learn than a conventional guitar, Dahm said, but he’s made more complicated instruments by request — one local doctor is the proud owner of a six-string model, custom-built around a metal bedpan complete with an outhouse-shaped case.

A young entrepreneur

Amanda Woods is the only vendor at the Saturday Market who had a market booth before she could legally hold a job. An incoming freshman at Summit High School, 14-year-old Amanda is in her second year selling hair pins decorated with handmade silk flowers at the market.

A few years back, she spotted some similar hair pins at a local store and concluded she could make her own at a better price. Classmates saw her wearing her creations at school, and she was soon filling custom orders for her friends. Last summer, she secured her own booth at the Saturday Market.

“It really hasn’t been that much (work),” she said. “I really just enjoy making them.”

Grandmother Judy Clark, staffing the booth with Amanda on Saturday, said she’s continually impressed with her granddaughter’s ambition. Beyond running her business, Amanda is a talented flutist and maintains a straight-A average, Clark said, something she could hardly imagine doing at such a young age.

“I was probably still playing with dolls at 13,” Clark said. “She’s not afraid to tackle anything.”

Working with rocks

A rockhound since childhood, “Wild Bill” Irvin taught himself flintnapping as a way of finding something to do with his multi-ton collection of obsidian, opals and other stones that had began crowding out the backyard of his Terrebonne home.

Irvin soon began chipping arrowheads, spear points and knives, fitting them into handcrafted bone or wood handles. A fixture at the market in recent years, he’s since expanded into jewelry, and is learning silversmithing to turn small slabs of polished stone into pendants.

At a knife show in April, Irvin cracked open a door to a new outlet for his craft. A movie producer approached him about making props for an upcoming film, and while Irvin is still thin on details — Gene Hackman is involved somehow, it’s a Western of some kind, and it could be two to three years before it’s seen in theaters — he’s committed to doing the work and eager to get started.

“It’s gonna be neat to see the movie and see my name way down there in the credits,” he said. “’Here it comes, get ready to pause it!’”