Customers who were weighed down with plastic bags full of koa pens, T-shirts, jewelry and art bumped into one another as they shuffled amid booths displaying the handmade work of 60 Hawai'i artists and craft people.

"This one is actually small," organizer Karen Kuba said one night last week as shoppers swirled around her. "We wanted to give our artists plenty of room."

Just a few weekends before, the Hawaii Okinawa Center and its parking lot were bursting with 190 craft-fair booths, which rang up thousands of dollars in sales despite a rain-soaked weekend.

After years of steady decline, Hawai'i's once-bursting craft-fair industry has rebounded this year. The number of fairs had fallen off by more than 100 over five years, according to Jenny Tamura, whose Web site tracks local craft events. But this year the number jumped back to 219, after a similar increase in 2002.

Craft-fair organizers believe that revenues also are up, although they don't have numbers because sales figures are between individual artists and the Internal Revenue Service. The state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism does not track craft-fair sales, although the money generated can be significant.

The revitalization of Hawai'i's craft-fair industry is the result of a stronger economy and more experienced organizers. Shoppers are pouring into fairs and spending hundreds of dollars each for hand-made Christmas presents despite the rainy weekends.

Debbie Choy of Mililani held up a Hello Kitty tank top at the Hawaii Okinawa Center's fair, then poked through her shopping bag to reveal the Cinderella and "Finding Nemo" bath towels she bought for her son and daughter.

Choy had also come to the center's previous craft fair. And despite the downpour, she still managed to spend about $100.

"It was really raining," Choy said. "But it just made me rush to buy things."

The continued increase in fairs this year — particularly this Christmas shopping season — represents a maturing for Hawai'i's 30-year-old craft-fair industry.

The fairs began as an inexpensive outlet for artists to display their works to appreciative customers. The number exploded in the late 1980s and early 1990s as schools, churches and philanthropic organizations realized they could raise money by organizing large-scale craft fairs on their grounds and charging fees to the artists.

But as the market became saturated, many organizers didn't want to pay the money to advertise and customers found it difficult to discriminate among competing fairs. Artists then saw the hundreds of dollars they paid for booths didn't always translate into sales.

The explosion in fairs also changed their tone. What had started as a showcase for one-of-a-kind artwork, took on a swap meet atmosphere at some where shoppers could find the same products at every other craft fair — and at bargain prices.

"There is kind of a blur," said Ann Asakura, who co-founded the TEMARI Center for Asian and Pacific Arts and has been running craft fairs inside the McKinley High School cafeteria for the past 21 years. "There is a lot of imitative works. A lot of it is cookie-cutter. It gets quite boring after a while."

At its peak in the late 1980s, Asakura's craft fairs swelled to 85 artists and generated $20,000 in revenue. Now she's down to 50 artists and wants to focus on the artistic nature of their work.

In 1997, Asakura said, "we drew a line in the sand and said, 'We're not going to have lots of people just because that's what everyone's doing.' "

It was the same year that Tamura began tracking the number of Hawai'i's craft fairs because they seemed to be disappearing.

"I was really concerned in '97," said Tamura, who posts the list of craft fairs on her site at www.icb-hawaii.com. "I knew we were oversaturated and I knew things were going to go downhill. A lot of fair organizers stopped holding them because they couldn't attract the crafts people. By 2001, they had really bottomed out."

Many artists reacted by getting better organized. Some of them formed the nonprofit Handcrafters and Artisans Alliance in 1999, which now puts on 12 to 15 craft fairs each year.

The group charges artists $100 per booth and spends about $5,000 advertising each fair, as well as distributing nearly 2,000 fliers through Waikiki hotels.

"We're very aggressive with our advertising," said the group's executive director, Nancy Calhoun.

The emergence of large-scale fairs such as the ones put on by the Handcrafters and Artisans Alliance means that artists and shoppers now can pick from a wide range.

Some groups, such as the Pacific Handcrafters Guild, put on high-end events that focus on artistry. Smaller organizations opt for neighborhood, mom-and-pop fairs to raise money for their groups. Others prefer large-scale fairs that include a wide range of goods, as long as they're made by hand and made in Hawai'i.

"We take everybody from tutu making beer-can hats to somebody who's a fine artist," Calhoun said. "We don't try to quantify how good the product is. But we do want to verify that it's something they made themselves."

Caroline Infante organizes two craft fairs each year at the Neal Blaisdell Center, each one filled with more than 400 vendors and more than 25,000 shoppers.

"In the 1980s we had amazing success," Infante said. "But we were not business people. We would put things on the table and they would disappear. We were just thrilled to sell anything. We had beautiful things at bargain-basement prices. But none of us had business licenses."

Over the years, artists realized they had to raise their prices to cover their expenses and make a little profit, Infante said. They also understood the benefits of spending money to advertise.

"Craft fairs changed from loosely organized events to coordinated business events," Infante said. "They're more professional now. It's not a hobby kind of thing anymore."

As the craft-fair industry shows signs of renewed life, however, its long-range future remains uncertain.

Bob McWilliams used to coordinate the craft fairs for the Pacific Handcrafters Guild but dropped out, he said, because "I was tired of making the same things over and over again and the public gets tired of that, too."

McWilliams now teaches ceramics at Punahou School. And he worries that a new generation doesn't seem interested in craft fairs.

"The medium age is getting older," McWilliams said, "and there aren't a whole lot of young artists who want to make the artwork and display them at craft fairs. There is going be a lull."

Potter Leroy Taba recently took on a second career in real estate because his art was not enough to guarantee a comfortable retirement.

As Taba plans for his future he also wonders who will take his place at craft fairs in the years ahead.

"We were the hippie generation," Taba said. "Now there aren't a lot of new people who want to do this. I don't know what's going to happen."