TORRENTIAL rain put off hundreds from visiting the Contemporary Craft Fair at Bovey Tracey last weekend but organisers say that sales were as strong as ever.Volunteers had to lay down large quantities of straw to stop cars and people getting bogged down at Marsh Mill during five hours of heavy rain on Saturday.Sarah James, who created the fair six years ago, said: 'I've never seen anything like it. It was like Glastonbury but we handled it extremely well. The field's looking a bit frazzled but in a month's time you won't even know we've been there.'She said that visitor numbers suffered slightly with 7,500 attending instead of more than the 9,000 as expected. 'The numbers were affected by the amount of rain but the sales were very good, if not up. 'I think a lot of people had already arrived in the morning before the weather broke, so they were captured so to speak. We seemed to attract a lot of people from further afield. Some people put off by the weather on Saturday, came on Sunday instead.'The three-day event has established itself as the biggest and best craft event outside London, attracting the brightest and most innovative talent in the country.Two exhibitors who welcomed the rain were mud artists Jacquie Abey and Jill Smallcombe. Their installation, consisting of mud-dipped hessian cloths stretched across the branches of a huge tree, was dependent on rain, Sarah said. 'If it hadn't rained they would have had to splash some water on it.'In the Children's Craft Tent, youngsters tried their hands at candle-dipping, mosaic-making and finger-knitting. The Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter also ran historic craft workshops about the Tudors, the Romans and the second world war.Ms James said the main stars of the show were the craftspeople. More than 170 designer-makers attended, covering every craft discipline from stone-carving to glassblowing.