Ken Gillis has a great penny-farthing bicycle he’s fashioned out of decorative metal but it’s staying home in Freeport until the economy brightens.

The decorative bicycle, like other lawn ornaments he fashions in his spare time, are not big sellers these days on the Maine craft-fair circuit. Whether it’s high oil prices or just a case of nerves among consumers, sales of big items are down.

“We get a lot of tire-kickers,” Gillis said Saturday morning at the annual Auburn Middle School craft fair. “They’ll tell you how much they like them, but they don’t buy them – not this year.”

Big items can cost a couple of hundred dollars, he said. Instead, people are buying the smaller wood crafts he brings along, and planters, bird houses and bells. Those sell for tens of dollars, not hundreds.

“But we’re doing pretty well,” he said. “People are still buying, just not the big things. That’s the way the economy is looking right now.”

He and his wife, Pauline, responded by lowering the prices on some of their more popular sellers. Before, their wooden planter boxes would sell for $15 to $25 each, depending on the size.

They cut the price down by $5 on each one, Pauline said.

“That’s about as low as we can go and still make any money on them,” Ken Gillis said. “Any lower, and we might as well just give them away.”

He has been making decorative crafts for about 20 years. Most went out the door as Christmas presents to friends and family.

“But at some point, we had to start selling them,” Pauline said. “We just needed the room.”

In a booth around the corner in the school’s gym, Kristina Myers said she had dropped the prices on all of her handmade jewelry by about one-third.

“I’ve been doing it long enough to know what you have to do to stay competitive,” she said. Things were looking up.

“It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I think things are getting better,” she said. “Maybe people are more confident now that he election is over or maybe it’s because oil prices have gone down. But they are shopping more this week than they have.”

Alexandre Strokanova of Vermont compared the economy at craft shows to people eating out. He and his wife, Elena, will be at the National Guard Armory in Lewiston through Sunday selling handmade carvings at the Maine Made Craft Show.

“The fancy restaurants are not doing very well, but McDonald’s is,” Strokanova said. “People are more willing to spend money on the dollar menu when they go out.”

Back at Auburn Middle School, Tracy and John Dyer of Sabattus decided they needed to spend a little money to stay competitive. John built a portable wooden partition for Tracy’s business, bath and body products. Saturday’s craft fair was the second at which they had used the partition.

“Before, we just had a table, like everyone else,” Tracy said. “We needed to do something just to stand out a bit.”

It’s helped.

“We used it at Leavitt High School last weekend, and our sales were better,” she said. Or, maybe the economy is getting better.

“I do think that people have a little more confidence in things now,” she said. “The election is over and now they have a better idea what’s going to happen. I think that helps.”