Good to Know

Here’s an amazing project started over at pikaland, with advice/inspiration from artists and other creative folk. Their 1st topic they cover is about overcoming a creative block. Amazingly good advice!

Good to Know: Issue #1

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Citrus Celebration

One of the reasons I love my hometown is the Inland Orange Conservancy: an organization dedicated to saving the old local groves that grow fantastic oranges that aren’t pretty enough for SunKist to buy. When you become a member, you receive 10 pounds of oranges every week during the season, and if you don’t eat them,they’re donated to local food banks. Every spring they have an event in an old grove that lets you taste all these amazing citrus varieties and just revel in the orange-blossom-ness of our town. When we went yesterday, a reporter caught a good picture of my older son Liam trying what looks like a blood orange – and his picture made the story! Pretty cool!

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Happy Easter!

Well, the Easter Bunny has come & gone, leaving behind a spider web of string for the boys to follow to their baskets, as well as plenty of eggs outside to hunt. Now a peaceful day, full of chocolate and reading until Daddy gets home from playing his Easter gig. And later, a leg of lamb dinner! Here are some pix of our fun morning!

Liam very intent

Logan carefully winding up the string

Will we ever find the basket?

Stirling says "what the heck are they doing?"

Logan gets the prize for finding the OLDEST egg - this one is from LAST YEAR! (No, we didn't open it...)

This butterfly remained like this for the whole hunt - just warming up, or newly out of his cocoon?

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How’s that list coming?

Item	Date Due	% Done
Floral quArt	3/20/2009	100%
30 Tie Dye shirts etc…for Elixer	3/20/2009	100%
Design Clutch – Will Tuba	3/26/09	100%
10 Notelets	4/24/09	20%
5 Warm Colors Grab & Go	4/24/09	0%
5 Warm Colors Clutch	4/24/09	0%
30 Going Green Totes	4/24/09	30%
5 Cool Colors Clutch	4/24/09	0%
Cool Colors quArt	4/24/09	0%
Crazy Colors Bags	4/24/09	0%
5 Cool Colors messengers	4/24/09	15%
Candied Fabrics Quilt	4/25/09	0%
Medium tote for Nicholle’s sister	5/30/09	0%
Laptop bag for Liz	5/31/09	0%

Slowly but surely, but dear Lord, I’ve been sneezing all day and I’ve got that sore throat creeping up in the back of my nose…AAAHHH!!!! no time to be sick!

And because no post is complete without a picture – here’s the 1st piece of art I ever sold…Just under 2 years ago at my 1st art show. It’s a “construction” of several of my little pieces of quArt (see larger description of quArt here).

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Advice to folk on doing a craft fair

I’ve now done ~ 10 local art/craft fairs, some juried, some not. I’ve learned a lot from other folk in the blog-o-sphere (this list of craft fair advice from The Small Object is awesome, also comments on this Pink Chalk Studio post), but I wanted to share some things I’ve learned:

1. Have a sign or something that tells people who you are. On my list of things to do is to make a 2-3 foot square quilt that has my business name 7 tag line on it. until then, I’ve got some 8.5 x 11 signs printed on glossy photopaper.
2. Tote bags look better hanging than sitting. You may even want to stuff them with something so they have lots of shape.
3. I am LIVING the “I’m not going to have enough to sell!” So you only do the best that you can. Every time I have a show, I keep meaning to make some smaller items like simple wallets, etc…and I never get to them, because the profit I would make is so small. I’d rather make one more bag than 10 mini wallets, and the profit would be about the same.
4. Assembly line – make 4 or 5 of something at once. It truly does cut down on the time/item – but freaks you out because none are done until they’re all done.
5. If you make stuff that can be worn, get a dummy/dress form to drape your items on.
6. I’m sure you’ve read lots of general advice about this sort of thing, things like wearing comfortable shoes, bringing plenty to eat/drink & duct tape etc… All of that is helpful, but the most helpful advice of all is that you have to engage the customer. You have to figure out when to just say hi and when to schmooze, but interacting with the customer makes all the difference.
7. Take the time to write or stamp your business name across a bunch of your sales slips. I ALWAYS flake out on writing all that I want to write on the sales slips – you want to be as quick as possible at the time of sale so that you don’t make the customer wait, plus you want to sell to someone else.
8. Keep your money in an apron or a bag that you keep around your neck – you never want to worry about where that has gone to.
9. Have a pad setup to add people to your mailing list.
10. Have a space for people to write checks that is separate from where you’re merchandise is. The last picture in this post shows the stand my husband built for this purpose (it’s like a tall, skinny bookcase. I keep plastic baskets with bags and other stuff I need to sell on the shelves accessible on the back. Plus my diet coke.) This is a new addition and I love it – before that people would scoot some notetakers out of the way to write, and I ended up with a notetaker with a pen mark across it – ouch!
11. Have some special order slips made up so you can quickly write those up – if you’d like to do that.
12. Bring some red sticky dots in case someone buys something but doesn’t want to take it just yet – then you can make it sold but keep displaying it…I’ve gotten a few special orders this way.
13. Don’t hold something for someone unless they give you the money.
14. Be prepared with an answer when someone asks for a quantity discount. Um, have two, the nice one and the forceful one when they don’t like your 1st answer.
15. Lighting! The cheap clip on lights in my booth are a godsend – you can get them for like 5$/each at your local big box store.
16. Have fun and rake in the dough!

I hope this advice helps someone!

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Selling Art

Tonight I sold a piece of art I was still attached to:

Yup, I sold “Home is Where the Art is: #3, Cabot Trail”. A friend of mine is going to give it to some friends of hers for their wedding present. I’m happy that she wanted to buy this, and I’m sure her friends will appreciate it…but oh, it was harder than I thought to let it go! I’m hoping that it’s because it was so new…I made it in January, but it spent 6 weeks in a gallery, so I haven’t been able to spend much time with it! I’ll have to make another something with this color palette – soon!

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Chartreuse is the new neutral!

Okay, I never said I had a dull sense of color! It’s just when I was working on this quilt, it seemed like this lovely chartreuse I’ve dyed worked well with just about everything, and worked well at separating lots of the stronger colors. So, when choosing the color of thread to quilt in the ditch, I of course chose…chartreuse!

Anyway, I blogged about the inspiration and process of this quilt over at Robin’s over the weekend. I had way too much on my plate that weekend, but found that it provided some creative impetus to “git ‘er done”…well, almost done. The quilt sat on my wall for a day or 2, and I realized it needed more stripes/walkways around the outside edge. So, for better or worse, here’s the final quilt:

It still doesn’t have a name, but besides the label it’s done. And I need a daylight picture: the plum color is not as dark as it appears, and the blue is not as bright. What I love about it is that the colors are very different than what I’ve been working with lately – and I like them! Again, here’s the color palette I drew from Robin’s inspiration quilt:

I’ve got a folder filled with images whose color combination inspire me, I’m definitely going to go the next step and create a palette like I did above, it really helped me focus on what I was trying to achieve.

In interest of full disclosure…we bloggers are apt to show off our workspace at their best, me included. Any old who, here’s what it looked like during the making of this piece! YIKES!

The me of this moment doesn’t know how i can stand the chaos, but during the heat of the moment, I don’t mind it – what is a testament to the zone I CAN get into – the creating zone! YAY!

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