It’s a gray day in the village of Revel Grove, but the crowds are bustling.

Despite clouds and the threat of rain, the Maryland Renaissance Festival in Crownsville is packed — lines run dozens of people deep to get through the gates, withdraw cash from an ATM or buy a cold ale.

And for the vendors inside the gates — selling jewelry, clothing, pottery and more — business is booming.

Sharon Lane, owner and artist behind the Clockwork Traveler, is busy in her first season at the festival. She’s worked at other shows before, but 2025 is the first time she’s opened shop in Anne Arundel County.

Lane, who lives in Colorado but is originally from Maryland, said she’s long dreamed of selling here. She grew up coming to the festival with her family.

“It’s like a total dream come true,” Lane said inside her shop. “It’s kind of crazy thinking, I was a kid and I loved coming here. It feels so good to actually be here.”

This season was her fifth applying and first time getting accepted at the festival, which ends Sunday after a nine-weekend run. Tickets for the festival are sold out.

She joins about 100 craft vendors at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, according to Jules Smith, its president. He said most of them have been participating for more than 30 years.

“It’s a healthy community, and they want to contribute to it,” Smith said.

Merchant turnover is low, and it’s not often that a new vendor comes into the festival. There was a season “around COVID,” Smith said, when they welcomed five new vendors.

This year, organizers welcomed two new vendors, and an existing vendor expanded into a second shop, Smith said. The festival uses a jury process to evaluate new craftspeople, who must make their wares by hand.

Inside Lane’s shop, which is on prime real estate near the festival entrance, are dozens of watches and clock faces, all promising to never tell you what time it is.

Lane creates her jewelry from old timepieces, including pocket watches and wristwatches, some of which are almost 250 years old. She’s long been fascinated with the intricacies of what makes a watch tick, and by the care and craftsmanship put into designing old watches.

She was especially drawn to the damaskeening on the watches — the tiny engravings and inlays that form elaborate patterns on the metal inside a watch. The patterns have no mechanical function, and are only visible when someone opens the back of a watch to wind it.

“They wanted to just add a decorative effect,” Lane said. “You don’t see craftsmanship like that anymore, and I thought that was really cool.”

Her jewelry includes necklaces, pins, rings, earrings and cuff links. The necklaces feature timepieces attached to chains on a swivel, so the wearer can choose whether to display the clock face or the intricate gears that once made the piece tick.

Covered with a resin, the pieces are frozen in time. She decorated the shop with framed photos of the jewelry, antique books about the history of watches and a tall tree.

Lane did some amateur carpentry to adjust the shop, which she purchased from a previous vendor, to her own needs. That meant tearing down walls to expose a tree, which stands in a corner and pokes up out of the store’s roof, with a leafy canopy above.

Now, the tree’s trunk displays some of the pieces Lane crafted for sale. She also built a display rack to put on the shop floor, matching the tree’s color.

Becoming a Maryland Ren Fest vendor is highly desirable.

In addition to the festival’s positive reputation among fans, which makes it a national destination, Smith said the fair has a “very high” customer-to-vendor ratio.

Similarly sized shows have more than 200 vendors, Smith said, and the Texas Renaissance Festival (the country’s largest) has more than 400. The Maryland festival’s high attendance — enough tickets sold for about 20,000 visitors per day — and comparatively lower number of craftspeople mean vendors can sell to more customers.

“There’s a real appetite for it here,” Smith said.

Lewissa Haigh, like Lane, is another vendor enjoying her first full season in Crownsville, which sits a few miles northwest of Annapolis. Her shop, Threads of Time, specializes in handmade, functional period clothing.

She had a guest vendor spot at the Maryland festival last year, she said, and “planned very, very carefully” and worked “all year” to be sure she had enough inventory.

Haigh said she doesn’t tabulate her sales numbers until the end of the season, because she wants to “keep striving to do my best every weekend.”

“But I do know that my stock has been dwindling faster than anticipated, so I assume I’m doing OK,” she said. “It’s kind of a weird way to gauge things, but when you start a weekend and you have only five shirts on the rack, down from 30, it’s like, ‘Oh dear.’”

Lane, who has sold merchandise at Renaissance festivals in Texas and Colorado, said Maryland is often a craftsperson’s most profitable show.

“I’m doing better at this fair than I have at the other fairs. And that’s actually pretty surprising, considering this is my first year,” said Lane, adding that she’s made “over double” partway through the Maryland season than in her first time at the Colorado show.

All the craft vendors have to demonstrate how their wares fit into the Renaissance festival setting, so it can remain an immersive experience. While there are some things that veer a bit into the fantastical — hand-carved magic wands, adoptable dragons, that sort of thing — Lane’s wares are, she said, grounded in historical reality.

“Pocket watches did exist during the Renaissance, and the watches that did exist were really ornate, because they weren’t super accurate,” Lane said. “So they made up for the fact by being ornate.”