Tag: updates

May 4, 2023

Expos and Spring

Me at Calgary Expo 2023

I’m around, honest! It just seems that long form blogging ends up on the backburner and so here we are! Making The Post apologizing for being out of touch which, I’m told, you are not supposed to do.

Doing it anyways.

I live in a place that has a real winter and some years it seems to go on much too long. This was one such year! Spring finally hit mid April for real and we are now in the headlong rush towards complaining about how hot it is rather than about how cold it is! My studio will finally be warm – and occasionally too warm – for a few months before we restart the cycle. I am looking forward to doing pottery in my ceramics corner when I don’t have to layer up to stay toasty while getting mud EVERYWHERE.

Spring is also the season for whatever spring shows I signed up for! The last few years (except the COVID YEARS) that’s been the Calgary Fan Expo and the Etsy Spring Market. This year the Saskatoon Expo is right after the Calgary one – this weekend in fact! – and I’ll be off to that tomorrow with my little polymer clay goods and my new ceramic pieces. The show is in the second year under new management so I’m looking forward to giving it a try. It used to be as good a show, for me, as the much larger Calgary one and a fraction of the cost. The new management is obviously unused to running this sort of event so it’s having some growing pains but I’m hoping it’ll get back to it’s heyday. It’s nice to get these big, fun, events to sell at comparatively close by. I’ll be in booth 605 in the artist alley if you’re around! Come visit!

To wrap up my spring show season I’ll be back in Saskatoon for the Etsy team spring market on June 4th. I’m part of the organizing crew for this one and it’s outside so it’s always exciting to see what obstacles we’ll have. As a rule, it goes well and we recover from the insanity fairly quickly.

April 5, 2012

Updating my Booth Design Part 1

This year I’m hoping to do a few more big shows – not quite the big big (the ones with $800 price tags instead of $300) ones but building up to it! And part of that is going to be updating my booth displays to be more shop like. That is, cohesive, original and in line with my work.

I’m not sure who ever told me that jewellery vendors use black but I think it crept into my brain. So I went with black table clothes, black display busts and jewellery racks. And when I got these great, super useful boxes at Ikea, I painted them black.

Guess what? Almost none of my work in the last ten years is anything but nature themes. The colours pop against black but the black is what every other jewellery vendor – and there are always lots – had. And black fades, nicks, and sucks light.

I decided this year I would take the boxes back to a neutral pale colour. The thought of sanding several layers of black spray paint off was horrid. In the end, I just primed and painted with a beige colour. I’m toying with the idea of distressing it to make it more vintagey but for now they’ll stay beige.

I even talked my teen into helping paint. We had lovely weather and both ended up with freckles of beige.

Since I’m hoping to fill a larger booth better, I’ll be using the great crates I got last fall. Thing is, they are used. Some need filling and repairs. All need cleaning and a little sanding. So that’s been part of the project. I love ’em though. And the combo of boxes, and the trays from the Ikea boxes, gives me tons of building blocks for shows.

December 2, 2007

Having a Ball

After a frankly… challenging… couple of months it was a wonderful feeling to get to sit down with the new-to-me laptop, a cup of coffee and dig back into my site and online clay life. Wow! So much to catch up on, so much to update, so much to fix.

So the site is getting a winter overhaul and some things are bound to be not working. I came back to more than 4000 spam, several hundred emails and a lot of other site-housekeeping details that will take quite a while to fix.

I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so happy to face ‘housework’ though!