Bacon, Shrieking Cats, Snowstorms, and Deciding What's Next

There are lots of great things about doing shows. The chance to meet some really great people. The opportunity to share my jewelry with customers. And since my children are well beyond their toddler years and I am currently between full-time jobs, doing shows is, without a doubt, the best fodder for wacky stories I have in my life right now.  And no matter how bizarre things get at a show, I can keep it in perspective by reminding myself that "it'll make a great story for the blog -- no one will believe this!"

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I did a show in a nearby city. So I get set up and ready for a fantastic weekend, when all of a sudden, I smell bacon.

It was not the cologne worn by enthusiastic art buyers or the aroma of credit cards being swiped fast and often.  There was actually a booth about 100 feet away from me that was selling artisanal country ham and bacon, and dear heaven, they were cooking up samples. You will be proud to know that I limited myself to one sample each day. But it was pretty funny to watch customers walk down the aisle with their noses twitching and a puzzled look on their faces...

Not an actual photo from the show. But now I'm hungry

The music, however, was a completely different experience. Piped in holiday music for eight hours a day. I do not know how store clerks make it through the holiday season, endlessly listening to it, without wanting to slap the living daylights out of someone.

There were 32 repetitions of "Winter Wonderland", about 29 "Jingle Bells", and so many people singing about chestnuts roasting over an open fire, I figured the world supply of chestnuts was depleted for in-home cooking purposes. (I'm not exaggerating too much  -- I actually kept a running tally of the songs played Sunday to amuse myself). Sometime mid-afternoon on Saturday, an aural offense was perpetrated that was so heinous, it nearly had everyone running from the event space with their fingers in their ears. Remember the "Jingle Bells" done with barking dogs?  This horror was similar, only using the meows and moans of cats.

What I imagine the lead "singer" in this particular holiday
nightmare looked like in the recording session.

Good grief, it was terrifying. People looked alarmed. Children wept. Have you ever heard two cats fighting? Yeah, that's a Beethoven symphony compared to what this sounded like.  Thank goodness it did not get played again. Happily, the show was better than the soundtrack!

And this weekend was my last show for the calendar year. A local show, with high-quality work, with an enthusiastic crowd of buyers who eagerly await it each year. It opened at 2 on Friday, and ran all day Saturday. But we woke up on Friday to sleet and ice, which made getting to the venue and unloading the car an adventure.  By 3, the sleet had changed to snow, and this is what it looked like outside the venue.

A lovely volunteer kept trying to shovel the walkway,
but as you see, it got ahead of him.

What you can't tell from the photo is that it was snowing when I took the picture. Heavily. All afternoon. The customers who'd braved the sleet evaporated when it started snowing.  The artists had a lovely time that afternoon visiting with each other, because there certainly weren't any customers (can't blame them!). Saturday, though, dawned clear and cold, and the roads were clear, so we had a strong Day 2.  I spotted someone wearing a necklace she'd purchased from me at the same show eight years ago (!!!), and helped a number of folks cross things off of their gift lists.

This was one of the things that went to a new home on Saturday. Yay!

Now that I have a break from getting ready for shows, I want to hop in on some of those new things I've wanted to explore. Perhaps some soutache. Maybe I'll finally tackle CRAW. Probably not. Then again, haven't done any freeform in a long time.

What's on your list of techniques or projects that you want to tackle next?

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!

The Aerodynamics of Beads....

...or why multi-tasking is not always a good idea.

We live in an old, three-story house.  The bead room is on the third floor, but I'll often take a project down to the ground floor to work on while watching television.  This means I then have to carry the projects up and/or down many steps.

Many, many steps.  Can you see where this is heading?

I was headed up to the third floor, carrying a bead tray full of seed beads and other assorted goodies, a Diet Coke, the cell phone, and a couple of other things.  It seemed like a good way to accomplish several things at once.  Halfway between the second floor and the third, I misjudged something and the bead tray tipped just a little bit.

Let me tell ya, when beads fall two and a half stories and hit the hardwood floor, they scatter like you wouldn't believe.  They take flight.  They roll.  They skitter.  They bounce.

These suckers look innocent and tiny, but they can FLY!!

Most of what fell was these 3mm turquoise discs.  I've found these four so far, separated by as much as twenty feet in their landing places.  I'm choosing to think of the recovery as kind of like an extended Easter egg hunt.

And now you know why nobody calls me "Grace"...

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and the Weekend Show

This weekend was show #5 out of my six shows this fall/winter.  It was an indoor show featuring the members of the local artisans guild.

Here's the good -- I bought new lights for my new tent, and it really made a huge difference in the visibility of the work.  Sparkly goodness!

Bonus points - the lights were nice and warm.  Good in a cold venue!

Here's the bad -- these table covers have been worked hard for the past couple of years, and they're looking rough.  Wrinkly, saggy, puckered...I'd say they look like my butt and thighs, but bless their heart, they make my butt and thighs look good by comparison.  Time to replace them.  (The table covers, that is.)

No amount of ironing will salvage these babies.

And here's the ugly.  We can use our tents indoors, without the tops.  I was on the outer row, where the ceiling of the building slants down.  As I raised the tent, I heard a worrisome thud.  Thank goodness we didn't hit the sprinkler head, and thank goodness the acoustic panel dropped right back into place as the tent was lowered after the show.  Whew!

Oh, my, I was sweating this all weekend!

So before the next show I need to buy some fabric to make new table covers.  Any suggestions on color?  If I do a pattern, it has to be subtle, since the beadwork has so much going on visually on its own.  Yes, that will be me, wandering the aisles in Joann Fabrics tomorrow evening...

Strawberry Stains, Cicada Attacks, and Breastplate-Wearing Women

This weekend was the first of my shows for the fall, and y'all, I'm still grinning about it.

The weather was gorgeous, the crowds were HUGE, and people were very responsive to my jewelry. A lady came into the booth wearing an amazing breastplate (really, the only way to describe the construction of found objects and wires that had been fashioned together -- this piece would be the dictionary illustration of "statement necklace"), and I thought "oh, goodie, a woman who enjoys showing off her style."  Sure enough, she bought two of my more exuberant pieces, this necklace from the A Time To Stitch challenge:

and a green freeform peyote necklace that I'm not sure I have a picture of.  Bless her heart, I loved that lady!

Of course, it would not have been a story from my life if there hadn't been moments of wierdness and klutziness.  I made my way over to the artists' breakfast on Sunday morning, got a cupful of luscious looking strawberries, and headed back to my tent.  On the way, I passed a small tree and was thinking how loud the cicadas in it were, when a huge thing (it was either a mutant cicada or a B-52 - this thing was BIG) flew right into my neck next to my ear.  Imagine, if you will, me jumping up and down, waving my arms and whooping, while all the strawberries in my cup go flying around the park.  I slinked (slunk?) back to the bandstand, refilled my cup with new berries, and went back to my tent via a path that was far from the Tree of the Killer Cicadas.  Back in the tent, I bite into the first strawberry, marvel at how juicy it is, and then realize that I now have a big strawberry juice stain down the front of my shirt.  Yep.  Fortunately I had some water, so I started the second day of the show with a big ol' wet spot on my chest.  Classy, huh?

Anyway, here are a pictures of some of the earrings that went home with folks this past weekend. 

 

Another show this weekend -- I'll be at the worktable every night until then, working to get ready.  And this time, I'll steer clear of cicada-bearing trees...

If You Weren't Born In The South, You Can Now Consider Yourself Bilingual

By: Grammerly
(This is going around on various social networks,
but I had to share it!)

I did my grad school internship in New York City. I lived in Milwaukee for five years. If I had had a copy of this then, it would have saved so much time and explanation. I'd have just taped a copy to my forehead. Bless their hearts.

Learn this rule, accept that all iced tea comes sweetened, and understand that for many people all sodas are "Co-Cola", and you'll be fine on your next southern vacation.

Love all y'all!

Not Beady, But It Made Me Smile Anyway...

Driving down the street the other day, I spotted something bright and cheerful in an otherwise fairly icky stretch of urban sprawl.  Stopped and looked closer, and saw what it was.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to drape the hydrant in an old sweater, bravo!  It totally made me laugh.

Hope you find something random in your day to bring a smile to your face!

How I Know It's Monday, or Why No One Calls Me Miss Manners

So at work today, I went to a luncheon, represented my employer at a table with colleagues, enjoyed our meal of curried chicken salad and couscous, and listened to a speaker talk about how the experience of a horse sitting on her head led her to completely change her life.

And no, that was not how I knew it was Monday.

The confirmation came when I realized, after driving several of my colleagues back to the office, that the blob I kept noticing in my peripheral vision was not a clump of mascara.

It was a piece of couscous that I had somehow flung into the air while eating, which lodged itself in my eyelashes and lived there for the next two hours. 

Happy Monday!!!