All her life, Betty Robbins dreamed of owning a gift shop. With the help of her husband, her children, and 100 local crafters, that dream came true when she retired to Bailey Island.
Today, at the age of 87, Betty can be found every Thursday through Sunday chatting with customers, ringing up sales, negotiating with vendors, restocking inventory, even climbing a stepladder to hang merchandise at the business she envisioned.
Seaside Creations opened with one room and a roster of 25 Maine artisans in 2010. Now, 15 years later, the shop has five rooms stacked floor to ceiling with the work of more than 100 craftspeople from across the state.
There are hand-turned wooden bowls and whimsical birdhouses, white lace angels and oyster shell Christmas trees decorated with pearls and topped with starfish. There is ocean-hued pottery, intricate woven jewelry, and the soft glow of sea glass. On every wall and every shelf there is something hand-beaded, hand-stitched, hand-carved or hand-painted.
“Don’t forget to look up,” advised Carol Michaud as she shopped with two friends on a recent Sunday in July.
The three women were staying in a nearby cottage and stumbled across the shop as they wandered toward the Giant’s Stairs, a dramatic geologic formation with sweeping ocean views and a trailhead just a short distance away.
Betty recalled that when she first set up the shop at the end of her property on Washington Avenue, several crafters asked how anyone would ever find her, tucked away off the main thoroughfare. She wasn’t worried. Between the Giant’s Stairs and the Driftwood Inn at the end of the street, “There’s going to be people and they’re going to walk right by us,” she said. And she was right.
While she was born and raised in the Western Maine town of Jay, Betty’s history with Bailey Island goes back at least four generations. Her great-grandfather was a minister who preached at island churches, even rowing across to Bailey Island in the days before the Cribstone Bridge.
Betty remembers spending childhood summers in a rented cottage, swimming in the ocean, wandering the rocky coast with her brother.
“We thought we were kings and queens of the island,” she said.
When she started a family of her own, the summer tradition continued to the point that her kids assumed every vacation would be a Bailey Island vacation.
When the time came to retire, there was no question of where she wanted to live. She told her husband, John Robbins, “I’m going to Bailey Island. You can come if you want or you can’t. But I’m going.”
John joined her, and it was he who built the one-room store with its well-shaded porch. A mechanical engineer, he drew up the plans, erected the building, wired it and even added skylights. As the business grew, he found himself tapped to build four more rooms to accommodate studio space and additional stock.
“Go tell your father we need a storage area,” Betty would tell her daughter, Cindy Robbins. “If we can’t have it, we need half of one of his sheds.”
In quick order, John would enter the store.
“So where is this storage area going to go?” he would ask.
Along the way, John became something of a crafter himself, constructing buoy-shaped suet feeders and carving miniature buoy ornaments by the hundred.
He even cut out wooden fish and mermaid forms to be painted by daughter Cath Olivier, who often spends summers painting Bailey Island scenes in one of the small rooms behind the register.
Cindy, the couple’s eldest daughter, was an integral part of the process from the beginning. In fact, it was her experience as a crafter that dictated the direction of the shop.
After spending more than 30 years in the computer industry, traveling throughout the U.S. and Canada, Cindy moved back to Maine and developed an interest in decoupage. She began to decorate switch plates and soon found herself selling them at the Montsweag Flea Market in Woolwich.
Her approach changed when she visited Lisa-Marie’s Made in Maine store in Bath and met owner Lisa-Marie Stewart.
“She took me under her wing,” Cindy said. With Stewart’s mentorship, she graduated to craft fairs and membership in the Society of Southern Maine Craftsmen.
Prior to opening Seaside Creations, Cindy spent many weekends on the craft circuit. Her mother often joined her, sometimes bringing along the driftwood centerpieces she liked to make from items found on seaside walks.
But when the work of lugging totes and tables to craft fairs around the state got to be too much, “I decided that it was time for the crafters to come to us,” Betty said.
Mother and daughter began scouting for unusual and interesting Maine-made items to stock a small shop. They didn’t have to scout long. Word of mouth among vendors led to referrals. Now, “We don’t have to scrounge to find anybody to be here,” Cindy said.
Judy Ward, of Woolwich, makes sea glass jewelry and decorative items for Seaside Creations. She attributes the shop’s success to the Robbins family, calling them “unbelievably kind and talented.”
As shop owners who are artists themselves, the Robbins family has a deep understanding of the passion that drives their vendors to create. They have an equally deep dedication to sharing the creativity of their crafters with visitors to Bailey Island.
Ward praised the quality of the items sourced by Betty and Cindy, likening the shop to more of a boutique than a craft store, but with prices that are “very, very reasonable for the quality of what you’re getting.”
“When they say something, they mean it,” Ward said. “That’s why they have so many vendors.”
The admiration is reciprocal.
“That’s the surprising part … the bonds we would forge with a lot of our crafters,” Cindy said.
“We try to promote the crafters — tell their stories,” she said. “If you tell a customer something about a crafter … there’s this instant connection.”
Cindy reminisced fondly about a recent interaction — a mother and daughter came in and bought a craft created by a mother and daughter from shop owners who are a mother and daughter.
“We all had a mother-daughter moment. It was so cute,” she said.
For Cindy, Seaside Creations is more than a job, more than a business.
“I have found the greatest community” through the shop, she said. “There’s so much love in that shop and I feel it every time I go in there.”
She credits her mother and father for what they created together.
“Parents say they’re proud of their children, but I am proud of my parents,” she said. “My father built it. My mother runs it. I love being here.”
For Betty, the shop has developed beyond her initial dream to become something greater than she envisioned. She looks forward to every season.
“I am giving Maine crafters a chance to show and sell their product,” she said. “And there are so many of them that are so talented that I just feel privileged that I am able to do this.”
Seaside Creations, at 47 Washington Ave., Bailey Island, is open seasonally from Mother’s Day weekend through the last weekend of October. For current days and hours of operation, go to seasidecreations.net or find the shop on Facebook.
