Arty Stuff

For posts mostly about art

Show, Thoughts on Day 2

November 22, 2009 in Arty Stuff, Business by Julia | No comments

Today’s weather was nasty, so between it and the econ­omy today wasn’t a lot bet­ter than yes­ter­day at the show. I mean, we only made ONE sale (a rather good one, to be sure) between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Wow, just wow. It did pick up between 3 p.m. and close at 5 p.m., but that wasn’t enough to make up for the lack of sales earlier.

In talk­ing to the other ven­dors, I’d have to say that sales were uni­ver­sally bad. I know that Audrey wasn’t happy, not just because of the slow traf­fic and closed wal­lets. Appar­ently the Cobb Gal­le­ria man­age­ment told the won­der­ful “Miss Daisy,” she of the morn­ing cof­fee and muffins and the after­noon HANDMADE CHOCOLATE TREATS that they “couldn’t” allow her there. Audrey, to her credit, promptly bought all of Daisy’s inven­tory and shared it with us ven­dors — props to her!

It’s not that peo­ple don’t appre­ci­ate and like our work for the most part. We heard the usual com­pli­ments and admi­ra­tion. I did over­hear one woman say to her hus­band that our work was nice but just cost too much; a cou­ple of oth­ers were ask­ing for dis­counts even though they were buy­ing just a few lit­tle beads. I just fig­ure that those peo­ple may not “get” the dis­tinc­tion between the mass-market importers, who will wheel and deal because they have sub­stan­tial mar­gins, and the arti­sans mak­ing one-of-a-kind items on rather slim mar­gins with no real wig­gle room. Plus there are the “Wal-Mart men­tal­ity” folks who aren’t happy unless they can get a bargain…but those peo­ple aren’t our tar­get cus­tomer base anyway.

It’s very hard to keep up a good atti­tude under such a try­ing sit­u­a­tion, but we did our best. We kept the snarky remarks between our­selves and a few other vendor-friends. Buy­ing silly fleece hats, mine a blue camo cat-eared one and Andrea’s a leop­ard cat-eared one, from our friend Tara Roberts and wear­ing them all day helped. We weren’t the only ones, either. Sylvie had a tiger-striped one, and at one point I saw the Chi­nese man that I some­times buy find­ings from in a red devil-ears hat! As we said to sev­eral peo­ple, “ALL the cool kids are wear­ing them today!”

I also made a sec­ond mul­ti­color open round­maille bracelet while we sat there, so I can say that I have open round­maille down pat. I’ll pho­to­graph those and get them up on 1000 Mar­kets or Art­Fire soon for some­one look­ing for a great hol­i­day gift for some­one special.

SC">Visiting SC

November 16, 2009 in Arty Stuff by Julia | No comments

Yes­ter­day on the way home Dee and I got to Pendle­ton, SC just in time for the Hole in the Bead Gang meet­ing. Yes, we did plan it that way! I’d never been, though I’ve been invited numer­ous times, and though I may have been to The Mer­can­tile once in a past life, I don’t really remem­ber the visit.

Since it was a potluck lunch, we had stopped at Earth Fare in Greenville for some­thing to bring and for me to stock up on my favorite trail-mix-type snack (Mocha Mar­ble Crunch) and other yum­mies. Other folks brought really yummy stuff, and it wasn’t all dessert! I have to rave about (Jo’s hus­band) Chris’s chorizo stuffed mush­rooms — OMG fab­u­lous, MUST have the recipe if he’ll share! Krusteauz lime squares mix is def­i­nitely worth mak­ing as well. We also had a brown bag gift exchange, to which I con­tributed one of my slightly wonky heart pen­dants, and some odd game that Jo came up with involv­ing a heav­ily wrapped box, heav­ily padded gloves, and one die.

Of course the best part was the Show and Tell. Andrea has been doing some very cool stuff with cop­per and Pris­ma­color pen­cils. If you want to see it for your­self come to the Down the Street Bead Show this week­end — she’ll have some of the pieces there for sale! Jo showed off her new project-in-progress, which I can’t say more about except to say that when it’s unveiled it will knock your socks off! Since we’d been trav­el­ing, we didn’t have a lot but Dee showed off her chain­maille and her first-handspun socks, while I showed the two chain­maille bracelets (square stain­less steel Byzan­tine and dia­mond cop­per JPL) I made dur­ing the con­fer­ence and my “show” chainmaille/bead ear­rings. Cindy’s pot­tery is won­der­ful, and her sister’s seed bead work is exquis­ite. Shane (who looks a lot like Abby from NCIS!) has been exper­i­ment­ing with bead cro­chet and with recy­cling plas­tic bags into, well, bags!

Dri­ving home wasn’t fun — traf­fic, the set­ting sun, a nasty wreck off to the side, and more traf­fic when tired — but I was glad to finally BE home.

Oh well, NaBloPoMo Fail

November 15, 2009 in Arty Stuff, Miscellaneous, Work-Related by Julia | No comments

In case you didn’t notice it, there was no blog post last night. It was a crazy but fun day, but at the end both Dee and I were wiped out.

I got up yes­ter­day and got on over to Roanoke Col­lege to make sure my pro­gram­ming team was ready to com­pete and to answer any ques­tions they might have. Once I’d done what I could there, I went back to the hotel, picked up Dee, and checked out. We then headed for the yarn store near the air­port that Linda Davis (the Roanoke CS depart­ment sec­re­tary, a FABULOUS and woe­fully under­paid per­son) had highly rec­om­mended. We shopped a bit and then went back to the col­lege to hang out, schmooze, have lunch, and wait for the con­test to end.

As for the con­test out­come, this wasn’t one of GPC’s more stel­lar performances…in fact it was a bit abysmal in that they tied for last place. The guys appeared to have a good time, though, and they cer­tainly made an, ah, impres­sion on the other teams and coaches ::wince::.

Once the prizes & such were awarded, we got on the road. Our ini­tial plan had been to head for the Blue Ridge Park­way and take that over to I-77, but when Dee found that I had never been to Floyd, VA, she stated that we MUST go there on the way, as Floyd is appar­ently the Artsy Hip­pie Cen­ter of Vir­ginia. We did get our bucolic coun­try back­roads drive, just on U.S. 220 instead.

Floyd is a lovely lit­tle one-stoplight town, wor­thy of a full day of explor­ing instead of the hour and a half we spent. Dee intro­duced me to the Win­ter­Sun out­let, where I bought two batik tops, and we vis­ited the Floyd Coun­try Store and the local nat­ural foods store.

Once they started rolling up the side­walks at 5 p.m., we got back on U.S. 220 headed for Hillsville and I-77. Dri­ving two-lane coun­try high­ways after dark is not my favorite thing to do, but I def­i­nitely see bet­ter in the dark than Dee so I was the D.D. Head­ing south on I-77 down that lovely steep eight-mile grade into North Car­olina and on towards Char­lotte, past the bazil­lion bill­boards adver­tis­ing JR Dis­count What­ever, it grew darker and darker.

Around Mooresville we finally decided that, it being 8 p.m., enough was enough, and found a Sleep Inn next door to a Carrabba’s. It was a good thing we walked to the Carrabba’s, because a sin­gle glass of Ital­ian San­gria with our tasty (albeit delayed due to a wait) din­ner was enough to put us both out like light­bulbs when we got back up to our room. Even if I had remem­bered about blog­ging in my fuzzy brain, my eyes weren’t focus­ing and my eye­lids felt like forty pound weights.

So that’s my story, and I AM stick­ing to it!

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Observations From Cleaning the Studio

April 11, 2009 in Arty Stuff, Miscellaneous by Julia | No comments

When there’s no room to work in the stu­dio except around the torch, it’s time to do some clean­ing! With the Good Mews Spring Flea Mar­ket com­ing up, it’s easy to get moti­vated because there’s a good place to take the useful-but-no-longer-wanted crap. So far there have been four boxes of stuff (not huge ones, but decent sized) exca­vated and removed, and a sec­ond giant garbage bag full of true trash is almost full. Along the way, I dis­cov­ered a few things:

  • the miss­ing box of craft wire, hid­den behind some other stuff.
  • three half-finished blank books, need­ing just to be stitched.
  • a whole bunch of foam brushes, sep­a­rated from the rest of the brush herd.

I also observed a few things:

  • It is quite pos­si­ble to have more shoe­boxes than one needs for storage.
  • Watch­maker tins are cute, but they really do suck for stor­ing jump rings.
  • Paints do dry out after twenty years, even well sealed up.
  • One person’s ephemera is another person’s trash.
  • One person’s per­fect stor­age sys­tem is another person’s stor­age nightmare.
  • The aver­age lifes­pan of a gel pen is some­thing less than five years, even if unused.
  • Work­ta­bles are much eas­ier to work on when not cov­ered with ten lay­ers of crap.

Finally, I con­firmed that a good label­maker is your best friend when you’re try­ing to orga­nize a studio!

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Best of the Week ending 1/25/2009

January 25, 2009 in Arty Stuff, Best of the Week, Business, Lampworking & Glass by Julia | No comments

Here you go, the best of the lam­p­work­ing blo­gos­phere this week:

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