Notes From The Road :The Land of The Incredibly Tall Festival-Goers

Y'all, it's been a while. While I'd love to excuse my silence by saying I had been doing something really cool, it's just been life getting in the way.

Surely you can relate.

ANYWAY, life finally allowed me time to do some shows, and I got accepted into three in a row. The first was this past weekend in a lovely, hip neighborhood in Chicago.

Perhaps the only selfie I've ever taken that didn't make me look deranged...

The weather was beautiful, which was obviously a result of my having (after way too many years of getting soaked inside my tent during downpours) put waterproofing sealant on all the seams of my tent roof. Kinda like taking an umbrella to guarantee it won't rain, or getting your car washed to guarantee a monsoon, right?

As always, art shows are great people watching venues. A few random observations from the weekend:

            1) Apparently, it's a requirement that one of every six or seven people who attend this show
                be over 6'2" tall. Seriously, I have never seen so many statuesque people in one place in
                my life.

            2) Two very pregnant women were strolling down the street together, with one of them
                pushing a stroller with no child in it. Either the stroller child was in the park with dad, or
                these ladies were very prepared in the event of labor.

            3) A skateboarding dog will stop everyone in their tracks to watch (sorry, I was too
                 astonished to take a video)

            4) Accosting every fair goer who walks by your booth with a shouted question will, in
                 short time, annoy the hell out of the vendors around you.
          4a) Corollary to this observation, I could recite for you my neighbor's come on questions
                and subsequent sales pitch verbatim. The fact that they were selling candles and kept
                referring to their "best smeller" should sum it up for you.)

            5) Wearing a parrot on your shoulder as you walk the show will stop almost as much as a
                 skateboarding dog (see #3 above).

It's probably also great advertising for your business, which is why I blurred his t-shirt

At a certain point on the first day, I noticed that a number of people were stopping to gaze in the direction of my booth and taking photos with their phone. While I'd love to say they were overwhelmed with my jewelry, turns out they were taking pictures of the house behind me that looks like it's being devoured by ivy....

The windows are nearly covered!!

So all in all, it was a good weekend - one down, two to go over the next couple of weeks. 

Busted, Blown, Weighted, and Moved -- The First Show Of The Season

I love doing art shows and festivals. I really do - I get to spend two days outdoors in the fresh air, meet fun and cool people, and hopefully make lots of folks happy with my jewelry.

At one point, I was doing ten to twelve shows a year.  Yep, that's a lot. Since I moved, I've gone pretty much back to ground zero, discovering and applying for new shows and learning what works for me.

All that said, earlier this month was my first show of four (five, if I get off the wait list for one more) between now and September.  And boy, howdy, was it an adventure!

The Saturday forecast called for rain late in the afternoon. Except that the rain started right after noon. This was my view for four hours.

The silver lining is that my tent did not leak, despite many hours of saturation. The wind did not blow the rain into the tents.  And there were a few hardy souls who came out with their galoshes and umbrellas and shopped the show anyway. Gotta love 'em!

First day = not so great due to crappy weather.  Okay, Day Two was supposed to be sunny.

And it was sunny.  But it was also windy. Chicago windy.

Holy crap, y'all.

Necklace busts were flying all over the place -- this one finally gave up the ghost and broke in two.

The clamp solution wasn't pretty, but it was effective.

The show organizer required 40 pounds of weight on each leg of the tent.  I thought that seemed a tad excessive, but I dutifully strapped two 20-pound hand weights to each tent leg.

I can only imagine what the guy at Dick's Sporting Goods
 thought when I bought eight 20-pound hand weights

And thank goodness I did -- by the end of the day, the tent had stayed on the ground, but even with that much weight, it had shifted several inches from its original location. When the day started, the front edge of the table was inside the tent leg, not two inches in front of it. Astonishingly, none of the frames suspended from the tent fell, and no jewelry broke.  That, my friends, was a minor miracle.

If you've ever eaten at Waffle House, you know they call the various preparations of their hash browns "scattered, smothered, covered and chunked." I'll forever think of this show as "busted, blown, weighted and moved."  And just like Waffle House hash browns, it's not a bad thing -- just not something you should experience too often!

So what did we learn this weekend? That an investment in a good tent is worth the money if you don't like leaky tent roofs. That when the show organizer says you need 160 pounds of weight on your tent, you respect their wisdom and experience. That necklace busts will bust apart after five or six impacts with the pavement. And, despite the soggy shoes from rainstorms and achy legs from chasing down flying necklace busts, I love doing shows. Next one in three weeks!

Wherein We Kick Off The Show Season, Try A New Setup, And Make Some Discoveries

This weekend was the first show of the season for me, a smaller, new (to me) show called Art on the Parish Green.

Arriving at setup, I found I had a corner space - and decided on the fly to change my booth arrangement to take advantage of the additional open side.  I also found that the person whose house I was in front of had cut his grass, kindly sweeping all of the clippings off of the sidewalk.  Right into the area of my booth.  Discovery #1: shopping bags, when used like miniature snow shovels, make a pretty credible grass clipping removal broom.

Usually I have my earring screens at the front of the booth, on either side of the entrance, with the tables set up along parallel to the back wall, with enough room for me to stand, handle transactions, and wrap purchases.  For the corner setup I lined the earrings all along one side, used a screen for extra necklace display, and shoved the tables together to give an island o' jewelry that people could walk around.

It worked pretty well.  And it led to Discovery #2: Dear Husband, who is my stalwart setup and breakdown assistant when he's in town for a show, was quite patient as I dithered around trying to figure out where things should go.  He's a good guy (but I already knew that!)

I had been thinking of making some tweaks to my earring cards, and I figured this show was as good a time as any to debut the new ones.  Spent several nights cutting, laminating, trimming, punching holes, writing information, and putting earrings on all the cards.  When I went to add the little strip of velcro (the hook side) to the back to hang from my display screens, I remembered that I had finally used up the industrial-sized roll of velcro I had, so grabbed some little hook and loop dots that were hanging out in the craft room.  I mean, hook & look is hook & loop, right?

Discovery #3: Different brands of hook and loop do not necessarily play nicely together.  Saturday morning, I arrived bright and early to put all the jewelry out, and started hanging earrings on the screen, only to see each card sail, gently yet insistently, to the ground three seconds after I attached them.  The hooky parts on the backs of the cards just would not attach to the loopy strips on the screen slats, no matter how hard I pressed, how nicely I pleaded, or how nastily I cursed.

After a few really frustrated minutes that included a fleeting fantasy of calling and waking Dear Husband to make an emergency run to Home Depot (it was still quite early, and even he has limits to his patience), I figured the only way to get the cards to stay was to wedge them between the slats and backing of the screens.  This worked, but the cards were, by necessity, a little at an angle and off center.  You'd think that someone who enjoys freeform peyote and asymmetrical design would revel in this little bit of freeform display, but having my earrings look like a bunch of drunken fraternity boys careening around after a hard night of partying made me slightly crazy all day.

Kind of hard to see how catty-wumpus these are, but it made me crazy.  Okay, crazier.

Discovery #4: Home Depot opens at 8 am on Sunday, and you can replace the velcro tab on nearly 100 earring cards in less than two hours if you work really, really hard.

Even harder to see in this pixellated enlargement cropped from the booth shot,
but the cards are all nice and orderly, back in their proper arrangement.

All in all, the show went well -- some really nice art, very nice people, and good sales, which leads to Discovery #5: Challenge pieces often are the first ones sold at the next show. These Adventures in Freeform and Bead Soup Blog Hop #7 pieces were among the works that went to new homes this weekend.




 

So, while there were no divebombing bugs and flying strawberries at this show, it did have its adventures.  And it's just the first show of the year!

Breakfast Bliss

At least once a year, we try to have breakfast at the Pisgah Inn, a beautiful location just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina.

The Inn is perched on the side of a mountain over 5,000 feet in elevation. Many times, we get up there to discover that the mountain is shrouded in fog, blocking the spectacular view of the surrounding mountains and the valleys below.

But not today. Today was sunny and gorgeous and clear. And because the Inn's restaurant has floor to ceiling windows on the valley side, here's the view we enjoyed along with our breakfast this morning.





And to prove that Pat and I are both way over the age of 14 and are therefore hopelessly unable to take pictures of ourselves with a phone camera, here's the best of the bunch. Pitiful picture, but the bright side is that we really amused all the other restaurant patrons who watched us through those wonderful huge windows as we struggled to get the (*&#$ camera to work...



Pictures of the latest beading project next time, I promise!

And I'll Do It Again If I Can Call Myself Elly May

Oh, the things we do for our children.

My son needs a bed for his apartment at school next year. We bought a bed several years ago for the cabin my husband lives in as a summer music camp faculty member.

"Perfect!" we thought. "We'll ask the camp to move one of the beds they have in storage into our cabin, and we'll let our son have the one we own."

Now, when you strap a mattress and box springs to the top of your car to drive it across town, that's normal moving.

When you strap it to the top of your car and drive it 400 miles through the mountains and in several rainstorms, that, my friends, is The Beverly Hillbillies.

Of course, for my kids, I would do it again.

But only if I can call myself Elly Mae and go for a swim in the cement pond afterward.

The Weekend Art Fair - The Booth, The Golden Arches, and The Ugly Truth

This weekend I was in a local art fair - it was the third year I've done this show, and it's a popular event each spring. So here's the saga...

Chapter I -
The Booth, The Golden Arches, and The Ugly Truth

Set up is always an adventure. I'm always playing around with the arrangement of the booth itself, but this one was fairly close to my last indoor show. Things seemed to come together pretty well. Here's the final product right before the show opened on Saturday morning:


Looked pretty good. Pretty zen. But look closer...see the funny yellow things near the roof?

Those are swim noodles. The things you give your kids (or keep for yourself if you just want to float instead of paddle) when swimming. If you have an EZ Up tent as I do, you understand that if there is any moisture in the air within forty miles of your show, that moisture will inexplicably and inexorably be drawn to your tent roof, puddling up into ominous pools that threaten to collapse the whole shebang. Fellow artists at other shows had told me they combat this problem with (a) hula hoops or (b) swim noodles, which they put between the tent frame and the roof to support the roof canvas in the saggy spots.

If only I could find something to do that for the saggy spots on my body....

Ahem.

Anyhow, this seemed like the perfect time to test the concept, since there was a 60% chance of showers on Saturday and 40% chance on Sunday. They noodles looked kind of odd, but I was optimistic. At worst, they would be a great conversation point.

As I settled into my position behind my tables, ready to welcome the hordes (I hoped) of excited shoppers, I realized that an artist's booth has much in common with the old saying about the swan. You know, a swan looks so elegant gliding across the water, but under the surface of the lake, it's paddling like mad. An artist's booth looks great from the front, but behind the drapes and the tables, it ain't so pretty:


The show opened, crowds were good, and the weather was fine until around 4, when we heard some ominous rumbles of thunder...

And then I got the chance to test the swim noodles. They worked. Then again, it was a relatively quick storm, and even while it was raining, people continued to shop. The day ended up dry, and I had enough sales to feel like treating my sweet husband to dinner out as a reward for being so helpful in setting up. All in all, I was looking forward to Day 2.

Tomorrow's installment:
Chapter II: Wherein We Defy the Laws of Mathematics and Meteorology, and Perform A Floor Show