Links, but not of the same category?

I've recently had our site upgraded, adding a links page. We attend arts and crafts shows with our food products, but on our link page we have, in categorys, various other art and craft vendors, since that is what we have in common, and I felt visitors may find this of interest (this is what I put on the top of my page description). Most of the sites I've linked to said they'd link to our site. My question is, since only a few are "food" but all are artisans, like me, will this be a problem with the search engines?

the search engine would give you higher score on 'artisan' and perhaps higher ranking for that too, it wont be a problem to them as long as it wont be like a link farm where the links look to artificial

Thanks for the input.

In the woods

Taking this a little further.
I too have recently created a "Links" page for informative websites relating to travel and tourism as my site is a single private holiday villa rental site in Southern Spain.

I know google likes text links, but the two links on my page also has the relevant logos. I read somewhere it is ok to have the image as long as there is a description and text link.

Does google actually penalize image links?

Google do not penalise image links - but for them to have any value, I think most would agree that they need:

1. to be related
2. appropriate alt text
3. an appropriate legend (caption).

I've seen it stated in more than one place that for images to do well in image searches, their ALT and legend should be rlevant to the surrounding pages' text. - This would probably be necessary for the link to be fully valued, too, I'd guess.